domain:philippelemoine.com
celluloid_dream
13hr ago
Yes, for the same reasons. They can make mistakes. Their gun is carried for the purpose of shooting people. It also must weigh on them.
marinuso
13hr ago
In the ancient Germanic tribes, men would go around with a sword to show that they were free men. More than just a weapon, it was a symbol of freedom and agency. Decisions were made by free men attending the thing and voting by raising their swords. Women, children, and slaves did not carry weapons, and could not vote. (And I say "ancient Germanic tribes", but parts of Switzerland kept this tradition up into the 1990s, swords and all.)
I get the feeling that in parts of the US, going around openly carrying a weapon carries the same sort of symbolism, even if it doesn't give you the right to vote.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
13hr ago
I'm curious what family, tribe or ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design.
Read my reply more carefully. You asked why people choose a side. That is the question I answered. It's not about "economic policies like price controls," it's about whose side am I on.
This is pure Carl Schmitt — that the essence of politics is the friend-enemy distinction: who is my ingroup, and who is my outgroup.
It's something I see often among the leftists on Tumblr — they don't have considered positions on issues, or even fixed principles, they have a side. They support whatever their "tribe" currently supports, because their tribe currently supports it, and if that changes, they change with it.
Hieronymus
13hr ago
That makes me curious: Do armed police inspire the same reaction?
ControlsFreak
13hr ago
When put like that, it gives the sense that one Mark Zuckerberg is seriously overpaying some recent hires.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
13hr ago
I am arguing that someone who is violent and drugged up is already so lethal that a gun isn't adding meaningful lethality, not that nobody is made more lethal by a gun.
TheLoser
14hr ago
I'm sorry, but if being equiped with a gun doesn't increase your lethality, then what's the point? Is not the very purpose of a gun to increase the lethality of whoever weilds it?
It seems trivial to me that a person with a gun is several orders of magnitude more deadly than an unarmed person, no matter how violent or drugged up they are.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14hr ago
More broadly, I think that the idea to use guns to keep the government in check was fine in 1800 but today is just laughable. Since world war one, the wartime capabilities of states and what US citizens are allowed to own have greatly diverged. How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
I really never understand this argument, particularly not the way it is made with smug certainty.
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Many people did not think this argument was fine in 1776. The patriot militias were very much understood to be out-gunned and under-equipped. Pragmatic loyalists argued in the continental congress that the colonists lacked artillery, a navy, a cavalry, etc. To say nothing of the divergent quality of firearms: many observers noted that the rusty muskets pulled down from over minutemen's fireplaces were no match for the cleaned and oiled Land Pattern Muskets of the redcoats. This argument has been made against every guerilla army, and while guerilla warfare isn't a win-now button, it has been proven effective.
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Hamas in Gaza did not allow private firearm ownership. Gaza, under Hamas, probably had around 20,000 civilian firearms across about 2,000,000 people, a 1% ratio. The US has an estimated 30 million "modern sporting rifles" (the NRA's preferred designation for things like AR variants) for a population of 330 million. If 10% of Gazas preward population had owned an AR, Israel never would have invaded. Which is the real function: it prevents government tyranny by making it impractical to enforce through violence. Once the shooting starts, the people in the military aren't vidya game pawns that go to the directed square and do what the commander said. They're going to reconsider their options, rapidly.
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What are you talking about with 10 round magazines? In most states, you can currently purchase any size you like. Just 16 restrict it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14hr ago
Were the other guns designed or made wrong?
No. They’re awaiting the opportune moment. Kind of like a SIG.
In all seriousness, the purpose of a thing can be divorced from its usage statistics. The vast majority of nuclear weapons have never killed anyone. Instead they work via the threat of fulfilling their purpose.
Guns are an effective threat against almost anyone. That makes them useful whether or not they actual kill.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
I can't say I agree with that. Someone who is so violent and unhinged that they might shoot you if you look at their girlfriend wrong is not meaningfully more dangerous with a gun, in my opinion. They're going to get the job done no matter what, even if they just have their bare hands.
Tree
14hr ago
I don't know what you guys are talking about, "Viande de boeuf, viande de poulet" is very common french.
Shrike
14hr ago
How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
First off, as a technical point, the ARs will have a lot more than ten rounds (30 round is the standard magazine, lots of people run drums with 50 or 100 rounds).
Secondly, gestures to Afghanistan the US army is capable of losing a war to an opponent with small arms and IEDs! I've never understood the "the US military would crush an armed populace" line of arguing because it had a chance to do that in the last two decades and failed. (And of course laying the blame on Iran or Pakistan or whoever is cope – do you think China or Russia would fail to arm insurgents in the US if there was a civil war?) What I find much more questionable an assumption is that the US armed populace would act like the populace in Afghanistan (or Northern Ireland) but if they did, it seems likely from history that the US armed forces would in fact lose. Wars are political endeavors and technology does not change that.
Thirdly, in most civil wars, the military and national security apparatus is not actually monolithic. Let's say that it's true for the sake of argument that the "armed populace" is not capable of "beating the US military" (I actually agree this is a fantasy because even if the "armed populace" could beat the US military on a giant featureless plain that's...not how real wars work.) In many, perhaps most civil wars, the military fragments alongside the rest of the populace. In which circumstance, it can be really helpful to have an armed populace even if there is no irregular warfare because they are likely to be better marksmen, more likely to be able to contribute to arms stockpiles, etc. In a prolonged civil war situation, the side with the support of the armed populace will be favored to win all else being equal. Which means there's a certain incentive for ideologies to promote firearm ownership (on their own team) and to attempt to convince the other side to disarm.
(As an aside, for this reason widespread firearms ownership is actually extremely beneficial to the US state. The US military recruits disproportionately from certain areas for reasons that are not but are correlated to firearms ownership.)
For example, I imagine that hand grenades are much fun. Or landmines. Watch the stupid coyotes explode when they trespass on your property. Contact poisons are fun. Radioactive substances are fun. So is building your own nuclear reactor.
All of these are, at least in the right circumstances, legal in the US, but the hand grenades and nuclear reactors at a minimum require paperwork.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
Maybe it’s because I live in rural Midwest but I just don’t get that worried about the guy with a pistol in a holster on his side. I’ve never once seen anyone pull a gun like that in public. Those guys are generally the responsible ones, the guy prone to shooting at people is not going to open carry because he wants to surprise people with the gun. Open carry doesn’t lend itself to sudden shooting or crime because as you mentioned everyone notices the gun.
Corvos
14hr ago
The gun massively increases your danger, surely? Firstly because it so hugely reduces the amount of effort he needs to put into damaging you, and secondly because it makes it so hugely more likely that the damage will be lethal.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
But you weren't objecting to volatile drugged-up gangsters. You were objecting to guns. And of course, there is a major difference between a pet tiger and a gun in terms of whether you need to watch them carefully for danger.
And yes, I realize that part of your argument has been the inability to know whether any given gun-owner is unstable. But the unstable people are always a threat to you. The volatile gangster can quite easily stab you or beat the shit out of you, even were he to not have a gun. I don't think that him having a gun meaningfully increases the amount of danger you are in, so seeing a gun should not (imo) make you any more nervous than you would be around any crowd of people.
Corvos
14hr ago
I think he’s arguing that the argmax you run over the logits is not technically part of the LLM neural network so the LLM is just ‘an algorithm that produces math’ (ie produced a probability distribution), but that seems tendentious and also kind of weirdly put because it sounds like describing a tokenizer.
wayfarer
14hr ago
The problem that commentary was not even interesting, but dealing with fiction invented there. (fiction propped only by fake or worthless credentials)
celluloid_dream
14hr ago
Is there so much of a difference between a pet tiger that could maul you if you accidentally trigger its prey drive, and a volatile drugged-up gangster who thinks you were chatting up his girl?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
14hr ago
Because I read DeepSeek's 2024 paper.
Shrike
14hr ago
Man, don't shoot the messenger here.
Ha! No, like I said, that's definitely not my ethos. But I hear ya.
Either way, the thing is that the rule against killing is, again to a first approximation, fairly absolute; and to someone who actually believes in an absolute rule, asserting that you actually want to break it in a fairly broad special case is not persuasive.
Sure, this makes sense. And of course Americans often don't believe in this at all (even when it comes to executions and the like).
Can you muster the theory of mind to understand that some people actually believe that there are no "bad guys" who it is a good thing to kill?
Yes. And I think you're right, there's an incommensurability problem that plausibly is only worked out on civilizational timescales.
I'm not so convinced that they are strongly correlated at all - East Asia has ubiquitous AC but no guns and an atrocious free-speech situation compared to Europe as well, Russia flip-flops but at least intermittently had quite liberal gun laws with no relation to its AC or speech situation.
I am also not convinced on the correlation, but I will note that I think civilizations are very different and a causal chain that exists in some cultures may not exist in other cultures at all. Sometimes just the idea that something is true makes it so.
I also suspect Europe's free-speech situation is, at least in some respects and specifically in some places, about as bad or perhaps even worse than Russia's – it looks like England might be in some ways worse than Russia, arresting 12,000 people in 2023 while Russia detained about 20,000 people since 2022 as per this 2024 article as part of crackdowns on anti-war speech (note that these don't measure convictions, and of course note also that Russia has nearly three times the population, but also that the article I pulled was focused on the Russian anti-war crackdown and might not measure people taken in for other views.)
Either way, the heat death figures you refer to always seemed fairly cooked to me - Eurocrats have an incentive to inflate them to support the climate change narrative, while the US figure seems pretty inappropriately small for its burgeoning homeless population.
I think it's pretty rare for ~healthy adults to die from heat stroke (some of these numbers might be due to aging European demographics) and a lot of the American homeless are in pretty temperate places like California. I believe US cities generally have lots of places for homeless people to get out of the cold, or ways for them to travel to more temperate regions. If I had to guess, most exposure deaths among the homeless involve drugs of some kind. But that's a guess.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14hr ago
Concealed carry isn’t about freaking people out.
It got popular in the 70s and 80s as part of the broader political struggle. Liberal, urban states adopted stricter policies and rural ones looked for ways to signal their opposition. Revoking old concealed-carry bans was one option.
Arguments about “not marking yourself as a target” or “strategic ambiguity” are secondary.
Rasumichin
14hr ago
At least for Germany that seems not to be true. From my experience, the required course and the cheapest safe available equal roughly the cost of a drivers license (~4000€). The comparison lacks another crucial detail. Obtaining a hunting license requires a background check. That would be fine if it the check would only pertain criminal record and mental illness. But it doesn‘t. As things stand, being in a non-prohibted (ie legal) right wing party may be an excluding factor. In other words, having the wrong political opinion may prevent you from obtaining a hunting license in Germany, even if you have no criminal record, are not mentally ill and have passed the licensing exam. The same applies for a sport shooting license.
The sad but accurate truth is that crimes of passion are common to mankind (men especially but occasionally women too). And when talking passion and anger, it actually is quite true that even small impediments can help reduce rates. I think when talking about society-wide gun policy, it makes sense to weigh the pros and cons; the typical gun-carry argument is what, that in case a mass shooting happens you can step in? Sure, fine, but compare the number of those cases to cases where an easily accessible gun leads to a death of passion, and I think the latter case is a clear winner.
I think being around open carry guns should be in the same "nervousness" category as crossing a busy street, or driving a car through a heavy pedestrian area. So being around a carrier gives a bit of an edge of seriousness, and demands reasonable attention. Enough to be annoying and noticeable, I think, and mildly unpleasant. Chainsaw is probably a bit too far a comparison in my view because of the intentionality, but lethality is far different for guns than basically any other mundane item (pens? please. except maybe knives but in the US that's not super common knowledge) so it's not an irredeemable one.
Mind you I personally have two main opinions on guns: one, that if we want to significantly change gun laws, we probably need an actual constitutional amendment, and two that insofar as the constitution allows* getting a gun should be a medium annoyance, no more no less. Requirements that are de facto bans are stupid or illegal. I like well-written red flag laws. I'd love for there to be a minimum licensure, think learner's driving permit. An interesting idea would be to also ask for a character reference or two, essentially someone vouching for the gun owner? That could create some desirable social externalities. I love being careful about buying and selling laws, though don't think an actual permanent registry or record is needed.
* (edit) I'm not totally convinced by the argument that any gun control is proscribed Constitutionally. To me the regulated-militia bit implies a strong skepticism of loose cannons and even an outright endorsement of some loose degree of government (perhaps suitably local) control. The text more or less says because of this reason, then there is a right to bear arms, and so I think it logically follows that if the reason is not satisfied, then there is no such right. A more extreme version of this argument I haven't seen much suggests that a properly accountable municipal police force is essentially filling the militia role, thus there's not even an individual right provided the rationale holds. I don't think I quite endorse that, but on factual grounds (i.e. police don't fill the role) not rhetorical ones. Practically speaking for the idea of a militia to work, you probably need an individual right, but I think states have some decent leeway there as to how they get that done, so I wouldn't call it a requirement. Which is also worth mentioning as national gun laws should never be the primary focus. Again, if you don't like it (either because you want more or less than that)? Yep, constitutional amendment, only way. Sucks but them's the breaks.
In other words, Heller is wrong (well, right on the conclusion but partially wrong on the reasoning). Or that it's correct but the phrase in 1(b) "so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved" holds more weight than the SC gave it credit for, i.e. states as holders of responsibility for militia regulation can do any law that doesn't result in a de facto infringement on the idea of a citizen militia, and the DC handgun ban clearly was an infringement.
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