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Originally Posted by Sparrow
Nope, plenty of posts where people question Harry's posts, and plenty of posts where Harry questions others'.
While I'm here though, might as well stick in a thought about the topic (this is the Conservatory after all  ).
I've always been struck by Mme de Staël's maxim "to know all is to forgive all" - to me that seems both profound and comforting  .
The knee jerk reaction is "but what if your x was y'd by z" - and the honest answer is I don't know. I hope I could live up to that principle; and every x I know would hope so too (as I would if I was x). But if I failed to live up to the principle, that wouldn't invalidate it. (And it also doesn't mean, imho, that my forgiveness matters, or is even relevant, in most situations - any more than my condemnation.) |
I don't mean "question" someone's post. I mean doing some research into the supposed facts and statistics that Harry likes to include in his posts, and which are all to often pulled out of the air.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Apologies for the error; I think, though, that the point I was making remains valid, regardless of that - which is that there is clear evidence that tightening gun control laws lowers the suicide rate.
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To quote from a rather lengthy article on the subject:
The U.S. has a high gun murder rate, whereas a country like England with strict gun controls has almost no gun murders and a very low murder rate. Doesn't this show that gun control is effective in reducing murder rates? Not exactly.
Prior to having any gun controls, England already had a homicide rate much lower than the United States (Guns, Murders, and the Constitution: A Realistic Assessment of Gun Control, Don B. Kates Jr.). Japan is another country typically cited (see Japanese Gun Control, by David B. Kopel). (Briefly discussing the difference in homicide rates between England and the U.S. is Clayton Cramer's, Variations in California Murder Rates: Does Gun Availability Cause High Murder Rates?)
Gun control opponents can play similar games.
The Swiss with 7 million people have hundreds of thousands of fully-automatic rifles in their homes (see GunCite's "Swiss Gun Laws") and the Israelis, until recently, have had easy access to guns (brief summary of Israeli firearms regulations here). Both countries have low homicide rates. Likewise this doesn't mean more guns less crime.
The U.S. has a higher non-gun murder rate than many European country's total murder rates. On the other hand, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Mexico have non-gun murder rates in excess of our total murder rate.
Mexico also has a much lower suicide rate overall than the UK, and has little or no gun control. Homicides are very high, but then the drug cartels are in charge of much of the country.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Got me on that one  I was a tad angry at the time. I mean to say that you can't arbitrarily decide who should give birth and who shouldn't, that it is a biological drive in many women, and let's not forget men sometimes play a part in the creation of children, and they also have biological drives too.
And the planet where it is a biological necessity is Omicron Persei 8 |
You should never post in anger, because your argument will end up full of holes. The fact that the desire to breed is an important drive for "many" women does not give them the "right" to do so.
I suppose you might remember the case of the woman, here in the States, who gave birth to something like 8 children over her lifetime and murdered every last one of them (or most of them). I can look it up for you if you never heard of it. Are you saying that the state must honor her right to produce her little murder victims, or just that once she has exercised her breeding rights, then she can't exercise her apparent drive to murder?
I happen to think that the state has a duty to keep people like that from breeding, and as long as it is done with a hearing and not arbitrarily, that women like that should be prevented from breeding. There are a lot of women who have a biological "drive" to reproduce (thank the maker that I am not one of them), but that does not mean that they have any desire to be a parent, much less a good parent.
I'll just admit to being on the other side of the fence with regard to people's biological drives giving them "rights" .... a man might have a very strong desire to breed, but if he carries that out through the means of rape, I think he's ended his "right" to do so. Feel free to disagree.