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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
They take this angle only after their actual prediction, a massive spike in murders didn't happen.
Well, it did, but not because of carry laws and Stand Your Ground. It happened because of BLM and pro-crime policies from people who want to use the state against normal gun owners.
So now they're reduced to mendicious phrasings to scaremonger about an increase in "citizens defending themselves from violent, crazy drug addicts". Literally their own second example is a methhead with a history of violence and a chainsaw acting aggressive.
However much you hate journalists, you don't hate journalists enough.
The KiwiFarms.st Articles & News section is the best expositor to date of this idea. Frankly it’s a sigh of relief and restores my faith in humanity to some degree. They tear apart the words of propagandists that pathetically go by the title of “journalist,” and it’s refreshing to see.
Thanks, I didn't even know that section of the farms existed. I'm not a regular there (don't even have an account) and mostly just go there when drama involving internet personalities hits my radar and I want to get the details unfiltered/uncensored. But now I have another reason to go there, thanks!
That section of the site used to be private until recently and you had to register an account to be able to view it. I was banned after the first comment I made and an admin marked it as “spam.” But it occasionally offers up some funny commentary on things.
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