Gun safety win on the horizon for GOP-controlled Senate

[Totem Polar]

I really think this is the heart of the matter. Too many people don't want empowerment -- they want to be taken care of. Whenever someone commits a terrible crime with a gun, guns and gun owners are stigmatized while the shooter is paraded on TV with talking heads asking what could have possibly gone so wrong in that person's life blah blah blah. If only guns weren't so easy to come by blah blah blah. I find the general response repulsive and un-American. Guns don't kill people, evil assholes kill people.

Instead, stigma should be attached to those who commit the crimes. The public response should be outrage against the perpetrator and resolve to stop more violent acts from occurring by using force if necessary. But that simply doesn't fit the world view being adopted and furthered by many across the country.

Self reliance, strength of character, and critical thinking have gone out of style it seems.

I got... nothing. Pretty much spot on, IMO.

[Joe in PNG]

Yup. Translation: the mob mentality is giving left-leaning people in power an excuse to bully their subordinates into toeing the party group-think, to mix a buncha metaphors. Appeasers gotta appease.

Folks, straight up: this is deeper than a cultural war against guns, and those that frame it thusly (most of us, including myself, until recently) are guilty of the same object-fetish as the opposition.

This is a cultural war against history.

The sooner we re-realize this, and work to continually re-frame the argument in those terms, the better we can move forward. If we can’t make the wider population realize that we are far better off as a whole with an empowered citizenry, then we are going to eventually lose to the mob. JMO.

It may be that the current campus activism, the mess of nonsense studies, and so on- all this may be the final straw that leads to the implosion of the higher education bubble.
That the bubble will burst is inevitable- the cost to benefit ratio of a degree is beginning to become more and more unfavorable.

[Totem Polar]

It may be that the current campus activism, the mess of nonsense studies, and so on- all this may be the final straw that leads to the implosion of the higher education bubble.
That the bubble will burst is inevitable- the cost to benefit ratio of a degree is beginning to become more and more unfavorable.

Many, if not a majority of degrees, yes. Not all though. Where big academia is really falling down is in the humanity/critical thinking degrees; the ones that are supposed to create more well-rounded thinkers for the betterment of society. That's the bubble that will be bursting, IMO. We've done this discussion before, so I should probably stop before I agent-derailleur this thread into the weeds.

[OlongJohnson]

I've said it elsewhere. The left-right divide essentially comes down to different ideas about the nature of the individual, the nature of individual responsibility, and the relationship of the individual to government. Pretty much every issue sorts out the two sides on that basis.

The side that believes in using the coersive power of government to make everybody better is carrying out a war of cultural cleansing against those who think its their own responsibility to be decent to their fellow man.