The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
I think the FBI denies this one, but there's the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8hr ago
Obviously fake and gay; I don't even need to check the details to have a high confidence of saying that. The FBI egged on a bunch of morons and then made a dramatic bust to get some agents promoted.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10hr ago
Israel could've gone into Gaza, wrecked shit, and left before it became a years long humanitarian crisis
Domestically, not until they got the hostages back. That's what the hostages were for -- to keep Israel pummelling Gaza.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10hr ago
I thought the scale was inversely related to how many drinks it took to flip the 0 to a 1.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
Strong-arm robbery is the most common sort according to the FBI.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
One can be below the law with not too much effort, on the anarcho- side of anarcho-tyranny. It's a mean, impoverished, but quite possibly freer existence, at least if you have no internal moral constraints on theft and violence. If you do have such constraints you're stuck following the rules but not benefiting from them, which just leads to an unlamented death in short order.
To be above the law requires considerably more. Great work if you can get it, though.
In between, you're on the tyranny side of anarcho-tyranny. Step out of line even once on one of the things those with power care about, and you're headed for the unlamented death. This is enforced in all sorts of ways -- New Jersey's draconian penalties for a law-abiding citizen carrying a gun is only one of them. Drunk driving law is another -- doing that gets a lot of people into a cycle where they drive illegally (because they live and work somewhere you have to drive), get busted, go to jail, lose their job, have their license revocation extended, get out, get another job, repeat, for a very long time.
Others are less obvious; over on another board someone said they once managed to find an employee by sifting through the recruiter's discards, and found one where the employee had been rejected because he'd been previously fired. That employee didn't realize what everyone knows but most will deny: in most of the white collar world, below executive level, to be fired is to be unhireable, so you'd better learn to conceal it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
As Worf said unto Q, "Die".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The cops have Glocks too. And once you've been shipped to state prison for violating firearms laws (or homicide laws), you won't have a Glock and you'll be wishing you took your chances with the criminals on the outside. Sometimes your choice is taking a beating (or stabbing or shooting) from a single criminal on the outside, or being sent inside and taking beating after beating (and worse) from as many criminals as care to. Even if you're dead, you're better off than that.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
"Yes" and "no" respectively. These are not hard questions, and the fact that we agonize over them is how we end up in a world where a prosecutor -- a representative of the state -- is arguing that a law-abiding citizen sometimes just has to take a beating (or the state will ensure he takes many beatings in the future)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
This is what he said:
I formed this opinion when looking into DGU statistics* and concluded that many (if not most) self-reported DGUs were really unreported assaults (the wielder having essentially threatened somebody by pulling a gun).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
It ultimately comes down to a question of reasonableness, and I can't think of a better way to determine that question than to present the evidence to a cross-section of the community and ask them. If you can't convince a single member of a 12-member panel that you're actions were reasonable given the circumstances, then it's a good indication that they weren't.
I think you're well aware that you could be on video being punched several times in the face by a guy who looks like Nikolai Valuev, and taking a lethal self-defense claim to a jury in Massachusetts would STILL be a crapshoot. Anyway, the prosecutor isn't presenting the evidence to a cross-section of the community and asking them. The prosecutor is bringing the evidence to a cross section of the community and telling them. That is, the prosecutor who has brought this case has already decided that it was not self defense and is arguing before the jury that it was not. The jury is not advising the prosecutor on a point he is not sure about.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
If you are going to shoot someone it better not be because of an escalated situation that you started.
As it turns out, this is not the law. It's what anti-self-defense people would like to be the law, but it isn't. Provocation spoils a self-defense claim, but starting the confrontation is not always provocation. In Massachusetts, "conduct involving only the use of nonthreatening words will not be sufficient to qualify a defendant as a first aggressor”
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The reason why "respectable" men don't beat up street harassers isn't just because of the legal risk, but because you might very well end up losing.
That's only a part of it. The problem is if you lose you go to the hospital, but if you win you go to jail. Lots of respectable men have a breaking point at which they'll suffer the risk of losing.... but a much higher breaking point if they lose either way.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Who? A quick search indicates she was Biden's White House Press Secretary, and is definitely black, though not African American -- she was born in Martinique. The New Yorker seems to think she's relevant (she never was), but amusingly even Politico isn't impressed. Their headline and subhead is
Karine Jean-Pierre's book tour is non-stop cringe. Her former colleagues can't look away.
Democrats, who'd like to close the book on Biden, are horrified at the former press secretary's struggles to explain herself.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
You know who really can't handle jails and prisons? People who aren't habitual criminals or low-lifes. Which is much of the point -- you keep a population of discount Torquemadas around to keep the gentry in line. If I hadn't believed that before, being threatened with a stint at Riker's for a bicycling traffic violation would have convinced me.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I'm not discussing any particular case here, I'm not interested in playing games with fact patterns.
Then you're basically just blowing smoke.
What concerns me is the cultural message sent. I think we need to enable and encourage more physical confrontation with less fear of legal consequences as a result. We need to encourage more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified. We can't do that if we also say, any punch is a deadly assault proportional to a gunshot. Those two theories are incompatible.
Discouraging self-defense by gun does not get you to "more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified". You can tell because those who discourage self-defense don't want punching anyone to be legally justified; instead, what they want is for people to submit to being attacked and then call the police (who will typically do little to nothing). This does not get you nearer to your desired state.
Encouraging self-defense by gun doesn't interfere with getting to "more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified" either. Unless the law can't be made to support the complexities I referred to in my previous post. Which is quite possible -- but in that case, we're forced to choose between "law-abiding people must accept victimization by physically-tougher criminals" and "one can defend oneself with lethal force against criminals".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
He's already taken those 90% into account, calling them "unreported assaults" committed by the defensive gun user.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
There's a word for people on the right who believe this. That word is "fired".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I believe you underestimate the anti-gun fervor of the state of NJ. They'd rather imprison 100 otherwise-law-abiding gun carriers than put one murderer in jail.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
In old cowboy movies, which set the moral tone for America from the 20s to the 70s, it was standard that two cowboys would get into a fistfight while wearing guns on their hips, and the one that went for his gun first was the bad guy, who would be prosecuted for murder if he killed the guy punching him.
This was a very ritualized combat. It was between peers. The greatest age/strength difference was between a young braggart/fool and a tough grizzled man -- anyone throwing a punch at e.g. an elderly gimpy bartender was a bad guy, unless it was an accident for comic relief. It was obvious a fistfight was going to start, and very often the men would remove their gunbelts first. I seriously doubt it was that formal in the real Old West, but the movie version doesn't resemble what gun rights advocates call something worthy of lethal self defense today. None of the stories in the article resemble that; they all involved the offender having a lethal weapon, and in the only case it wasn't a gun, the defender was elderly. The protest guy also doesn't resemble that.
I think few gun rights advocates think you should be able to engage in mutual unarmed combat and then lawfully pull a gun and shoot the other guy because you're losing. But while self-defense opponents like to bring up that scenario, first of all they don't want the mutual unarmed combat to be lawful at all. And second, I think it's pretty rare. Less rare with a knife (because as @BreakerofHorsesandMen noted, a lot of people aren't very honorable), but it's the gun cases which tend to make the news. The cases brought up here are all easily distinguishable from that.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Sure, but even the homicide clearance rate is abysmal. 56% cleared, but only 25% cleared by arrest. Some of those were probably "self defense" -- that is, one gang member attacked another for being in the wrong place or some other stupid reason, and lost the fight lethally. But whether they were or they weren't, nobody's talking, so a claim of self-defense doesn't even get raised.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Like do I have to actually wait for the fractures to open up in my skull before it becomes self-defense?
As Rittenhouse prosecutor Thomas Binger said, "sometimes you have to take a beating". If this absolutely enrages you, you know what side of the culture you're on.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
We cannot change the laws nor the enforcement, but we can carry a gun.
Not in blue states we can't. (Though technically NJ has Castle Doctrine, I wouldn't bet on it in court. And the word it uses is "premises", which practically speaking isn't going to include curtilage even though it normally does)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
When people push back against her talking points, they're not being autistic, they're saying "be careful how you talk about 'those people' some of them might be here with you right now"
Correct. In fact, the whole "you're an autistic jerk if you push back against woke talking points" idea is and was a tactic used to prevent pushback so the small talk could be used to enforce consensus.
These are Ayn Rand supervillains.
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