todays outrageous fact: gun silencer sales

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Oh, don't get me wrong: my country is crappy in many, many, many ways. But so is yours. And I prefer mine by a long shot. Criticism is good, but it has to be done by informed people. Let me clear you up on your google aquired misinformation. But first let me point out those things you said that are true:

1- If by western europe you mean the european countries that were not in the USSR, then yes, we have the lowest GDP per capita. 2- "The entire Portuguese public service has been known for its mismanagement, useless redundancies, waste, excess of bureaucracy and a general lack of productivity in certain sectors, particularly in justice." 3- my government needs lessons in economics. 4- we ALL live in glass houses, buddy.

2 and 3 apply to the US, btw.

All the rest is wrong. Real quick: 1- Portugal is under an "assistance" program due to the crisis generated by the criminal bankers in your country. (not that the portuguese bankers are not criminal...) 2- It should be called extorsion program, instead of assistance program. The goal was to reduce the deficit and the debt through _ the obviously flawed _ austerity politics. The debt went from 89% to 130% of the GDP in 3 years. 3- Our healthcare was better than the american healthcare way before the crisis: Portugal was 12th vs USA was 35th. And it's probably still way ahead. 4- You are beging money to China, so... 5- In practice, we work more ours than almost every country in the EU. And yes, it's unfair. You should complain about your system, not ours. You having a bad time doesn't mean others have to. 6- True, although we have lower HIV rates than the US. 7- We left the colonies in 1974, when the dictatorship was overthrown. I doubt google has told you that we have african colonies. I can't phantom where you got that idea, let alone believe it is true. 8- Italy and Greece are more corrupt. But yes, we are overwhelmingly corrupt. And so is the US. 9- If they qualify for entry I welcome them and rejoice that they get healthcare. The right to healthcare is a fundamental human right. Money shouldn't enter this equation because whenever there is profit involved the rest becomes secondary. And healthcare is not behind money in my list of priorities. If people come here to get fed and receive healthcare I welcome them.

Now the real question is: how did you expect to teach me anything about portuguese politics by going to google? If you knew the situation well then we could have a rational discussion. But having to mention that we don't have african colonies is kind of a declaration of the debate as null.

But yes, I prefer my little crappy country. We are not going around shooting each other in the face because of the "right to bear arms".

Ah, right. If you really meant that, then it is reasonable to assume that Salazar supported Franco with guns. You won't see me defending the disgusting Salazar.

But do you want an objective measure? Do the body count, since WWII, of people who were killed by Portugal and people who were killed by the US.

The Ukranians gave their nukes to Russia when the Soviet Union fell apart. Now it's open season on them, and the EU isn't doing anything to protect them either.

How is that different from the EU? I live in the Netherlands, and it seems everything is done by foreigners, either here or abroad. Factories are closed down because the foreign-owned car manufacturers move it overseas. Local production plants are filled with immigrants and foreigners, you barely see the locals there anymore. They don't want those jobs. If the immigrants didn't work here nothing would ever get done. And when I was at university, there were huge amounts of foreign students and teachers. I don't think this is neccessarily bad btw. If you have free movement of goods, free movement of people is inevitable. You can't have free trade and not free immigration, otherwise everything will get outsourced/offshored. You have both, or neither.

The problem is that those weapons already exist. You can voluntarily disarm yourself, but who is going disarm the others? The non-proliferation treaty only disarms some. It's actually pretty rational to work towards disarming countries you see as opponents while keeping your own nukes. I'm actually more afraid of effective countermeasures against nukes than of nukes themselves. The invention of those would spark a new arms race and upset the fragile peace we have.

Difference of degree.

The European side of my family has lived there for hundreds of years. Lots of civilized countries have a bad side. The Anschluss probably would have passed without Nazi cheating. There's still Nazi sympathy in a lot of Austria. One of my relatives over there was a war resister and was almost beheaded for it. He was treated like a traitor after the war. But you know better, huh?



What will your intolerance do to stop it? To prevent them from ever coming back, you'll need to destroy the material or the knowledge. The knowledge to make fission bombs overlaps with a lot of important peaceful expertise: MRIs, radioactive tracers used in medical imaging, radiation therapy, carbon-dating, power sources for deep space probes, understanding of stars, and so on. If you wipe out enough knowledge to make it hard to build a bomb, you'll make the people who burned the library in Alexandria look like proper archivists.

Wiping out the material isn't easy because you can make fissionable isotopes in an accelerator if you really need to. You still need another source of energy, but it gives you energy density that's useful for bombs.



Who are we bombing? Do we have a single soldier in Iraq? I'll be snide and say that we bombed Iraq because Laura Bush wanted to teach little Arab girls to read. Anyway, you'll get your wish: We're now the world's third largest oil producer, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.



We already do that. Maybe we should do more, but it's a big world. We're only 300 million people out of 9 billion. We've also done it for a long time. My city alone fed much of Europe after WWII. Minneapolitans filled entire fleets of cargo ships with flour keep them from starving. We were called "the milling capitol of the world" for a good reason.



I'm not too interested in dominating or leading anybody. Most Americans have the same attitude. We signed the Washington Naval Treaty. We signed the Neutrality Act, which even prevented us from selling weapons to Britain. We didn't invade the Soviet Union after the fall of Berlin, even though the Russians were vulnerable then, and we had the bomb. Eisenhower offered mutual overflights to Stalin as an arms control measure, to avoid the nuclear buildup of the Cold War. (Stalin rejected that.) We gave up the Philippines, and a lot of Americans had opposed taking them in the first place. We gave up Panama, even though the canal was a key strategic asset. And we did both of those at the height of our power, not because our empire was crumbling.



I haven't seen much evidence that average citizens (voters) are very good about that either.



Yes, we need to do better on those issues, but I disagree with you about importing scientists. We took a lot of the top German scientists after the war, but I've always found German scientists to be too afraid of making mistakes. Bean couners like MacNamara loved that, because mistakes cost money. Their ideal scientist is a machine for turning out new, salable products, and both the Germans and Japanese scientists fit the bill.

Last edited by NobodyKnows on 03 May 2014, 11:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You didn't sound very informed about US policy.



By what measure?



It's hard to have more than a paper right to a limited resource. Medicine depeds on skills that most people lack. Even doctors aren't very good at solving multi-variable problems, and biology has a lot of them.

I may be misinterpreting you also, and I apologize if that's the case. I wouldn't call allowing silencers or guns "deplorable." Debatable, yes. If we're going to consider banning or regulating anything that's dangerous, unnecessary or excessive, remember that cars, alcohol and sex can all fit in that category. A lot of things can.

America should do better. I think that most Americans take that as a given. I still find a lot of the recent criticisms destructive. Even when they suggest solutions that might work, those solutions have side effects. In the excerpt above, I pointed to some of the downsides of strong central governments and tame populations.

It was estimated that if the U.S. abruptly ended all of its foreign aid programs that over one billion people around the earth would die within a month

"Now the real question is: how did you expect to teach me anything about portuguese politics by going to google? If you knew the situation well then we could have a rational discussion. But having to mention that we don't have african colonies is kind of a declaration of the debate as null."

I agree 100%. It would be a pointless effort in a pointless thread.

But I'm hoping you'll realize your information about the U.S. is also close to 100% off the mark and that your ranting about the U.S. makes as much sense as my trying to teach you about Portugal.

And the whole point of my dredging up dirt about Portugal was to illustrate our similar situations should give us something to work toward together, instead of always at each others throats; I'm "sure" we're better at this than wild animals.

I didn't think you would miss the point and take offence. Sorry I didn't make it clearer.

denny

Sorry I missed this post earlier.

Don't understand how I moved the goalposts. An uneducated gun owner is an uneducated gun owner. Not knowing safe use is still ignorance. There are plenty out there. I wasn't talking about people who use holsters, I'm talking about people those people you mentioned who walk around with a handgun in the waistband of their sweatpants pointed at their junk.

It seems you are saying that someone who purchases a gun instantly becomes more knowledgeable than anyone who does not own one. I have just seen too many people who think shooting into the air on the 4th of July makes them a patriotic American. People who wave a firearm around without even bothering to check the safety. People who don't see a problem with leaving their firearm in the nightstand while they go out to the store and leave the kids at home. People who shoot at street signs without thinking that maybe the bullet will go further than that. People who think that pointing a gun at someone they are pissed at is always the best solution.

Yes, these are safety issues, and yes they involve uninformed people who have received their only firearm education from the TV. Maybe these people don't have some silly ideas on what a firearm is or what types actually exist or what they can do, but they are far worse, in my opinion. You should despise these types of owners just as much as I; they are the type of gun owner that reinforces a negative stereotype and gives the anti-gun extremists even more shouting points.

Idiots with guns and people who have no problems giving guns to idiots are the reason we need firearm regulation, not safe and educated owners.

Still laboring under the illusion that we have no firearm regulations and/or these new ones you want will save the world.
Same story - different thread.

This thinking is flawed.

Portugal had a massive drug problem, particularly heroin, that was causing a HIV epidemic. This was particularly because heroin used ballooned later in Portugal than other European countries, so the height of heroin use coincided with the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Also, it's a Catholic country...

To counter this, the politicians decriminalised possession of small amounts of drugs and provided methadone to addicts.

Heroin use has since dropped.



See here for a very detailed analysis.

I was not being sarcastic. It genuinely is beautiful.

And you still assuming that I don't believe that there are any firearms regulations. It isn't about saving the world; it is about making it safer.