- Alan Petrillo I'll look it up. Thanks.
- John Robarts Farnham's Freehold
- Alan Petrillo What really bothers me about this is that we seem to have one political party that not only distrusts social institutions, but seems to be determined to make sure those social institutions are not trustworthy for the people who do trust them. Thomas Frank wrote about this in his book /The Wrecking Crew/.
- John Robarts The Turner Diaries
- Thomas Trumpinski Alan, trusting government, in my opinion, is just fucking insane. Time after time, governments have turned on their populations and killed them.
You need *just * enough to keep one's powerful neighbors from enslaving everyone--anything beyond that, they become part of the problem. Remember my family's European adventures. - Alan Petrillo Depends. IMHO, what is needed is trustworthy social institutions that are kept trustworthy by a vigilant press and an educated, interested, and involved public. But it only takes a few people in key positions to mess that up. Especially when the public are more interested in who is screwing whom in Hollywood than they are in who is running their government.
- John Robarts the disease is "instititions" in the first place....just LEAVE people alone, they are quite capable of sorting out life on their own
- Alan Petrillo Actually, Tom, if you include in your definition of "powerful neighbors" conglomerate mega-corporations, especially transnational corporations, and making them clean up any messes they make, then I'll agree with that.
- Thomas Trumpinski The reason that those life-sucking bastard corporations have as much power as they do is because the government gave it to them.
Without government giving them personhood and limiting their liabilities, their power would be small enough that a well-armed populace could handle them.
Gun
control is not the answer to violent crime. Guns are easy to blame,
and the low-hanging fruit to try and control, but gun control alone will
not solve the problem. The problem isn't with the guns, the problem is
with the culture.
If a society's culture is violent, and
people have no trust in social institutions then that society will be
violent and gun control will be ineffective or counterproductive. If a
society's culture is nonviolent and people have trust in social
institutions, and those institutions are worthy of that trust, then that
society will be nonviolent and gun control will be unnecessary.
In
coming to this conclusion I have extrapolated from Steven Pinker's work
in his book /The Better Angels Of Our Nature/. It's something I have
figured out in pieces on my own, doing my own research on violent crime
and homicide, but Pinker's work helped this idea gel in my own mind.
But repairing a culture is a lot more difficult than enacting gun control laws.
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