Woot

I think victory in the pacific was absolutely inevitable and American economic power during the time period we're talking about shouldn't be underestimated.

57 minutes ago, Konakaga said:

Mass shootings shouldn't be considered common crime. They are due to frequency that is why it's a crisis. Addressing common crime takes different measures more like what Piratemonkey said than addressing Mass Shootings.

The thread isn't a mass shooting debate, ordinary crime is fair game to talk about and several posts before mine brought it up.

If we want to talk about common crime, the most dangerous weapons are the shittiest weapons. Hundred dollar pistols and shotguns are used in the vast majority of crime. Cheapness and concealability is far more conducive to crime than a tactical grip or a shoulder thing that goes up.

'Assault weapons' are barely 1 percent of crime however you measure it, and legally registered machine guns (there are still a few hundred thousand out there) have been used in about 2 murders ever.

It would make more sense to ban .38 revolvers than it does to ban Ar-15's.

The U.S. is a nation of >300,000,000 people, ~100,000,000 of them are gun owners, owning 270,000,000 guns.

And because we have a dramatic incident once a year where a dozen people die, you want to heavily restrict gun rights?

If we banned everything that killed a couple of people, everything would banned.  A thousand people drown in swimming pools every year - do you really need a high capacity swimming pool that's more than 3 feet deep, you monster? And so on.

Whatever marginal reduction in deaths you get by making shooters change clips slightly more often could probably be counted on one hand and is not worth the restriction in freedom to so many millions.

The response to this from the other side is usually "But swimming pools aren't DESIGNED..." and we quickly get into this weird qualitative argument where they try to prove that guns are a special unique situation where the rights of gun owners can be dismissed for some special unique reason that wouldn't apply to anything else except guns. Which is very convenient for them.

By the way:

This chart counts anything with 4 or more deaths, I believe.

It's obviously heavily distorted by outliers. But you'd have the same problem with chart of people killed by vending machines and rollercoasters.

2 minutes ago, Deus said:

For civil use I see no reason why they should be allowed. Maybe that's just too Euro for you.

Being against 'assault' weapons? That's normal even in the U.S.

Saying something should banned by default in the absence of a compelling reason to "allow" it? That is horrendously Euro.

You should clearly define "assault weapons", but I say they should be legal under any definition I've heard.

That one is the Fuso, and the Yamashiro is even worse. It melted camera film and blinded observers, but here's an artist's rendition:

1 hour ago, NerdDragon said:

Battle of Leyte Gulf - 1944

Remembered as largest naval battle ever fought 

Leyte Gulf was the greatest naval battle of WW2 because both of these fucking abominations were sunk:

But how about Jutland, in World War One? All the battleships and cruisers lined up and went pew pew pew at each other with 10,000 shells until some of them exploded, that was a proper naval battle

Quote

75mph down the 405

Trick question, nice try

Konakaga has it backwards:

also pls ban Konakaga from the new subforum, I get negative rep from them every time I say anything in a debate and it hurts my feelings

Integration is the opposite of differentiation, and the log function is just the inverse of the exponential function. If you understand one half then you can understand the other. Generally I'd just worry about learning the basic operations and identities and the bag of integration tricks, and don't get hung up on details of proofs and things like that.

When you look back on calculus one day it will all seem incredibly simple - sometimes you need to work with rates of change, or sum something up across an area or volume, so you turn it into a derivative or integral, and then use one of your memorized methods to go through the steps of solving it if you need to.

I think fortress, pirate, moneybags, and maybe blitzkrieg are the only ones worth considering. Moneybags or pirate in peace, switch to fortress shortly after you attack or blitzkrieg right before.

It would obviously be a major economic shock to the rest of the world.

The question is, how resilient is modern society to something like that?

There are some who think that modern society, with all its complexity and interdependence, is one disaster away from everything falling apart like a fragile house of cards. Any major problem with the supply chain would lead to more problems down the line, quickly grinding the entire system to a halt, and there would be food riots within a week.

There are others who think the opposite, that our advances have made us more efficient at everything including handling crisis, and society is harder to destroy than it has ever been.

I think evidence is on the side of the second group. There's been no lack of major natural or man made disasters in the last hundred years and modern societies have handled them pretty well.

Some statistics relevant to this thread:

I think it's more useful to talk about income than wealth. Only the rich stockpile wealth, most people spend money as they earn it and have few solid assets, especially the poor. It's common sense, you ask people how much they earn, not how much they have saved at the moment. Wealth inequality is just a byproduct of income equality that has slowly accumulated over time.

If you gave all the poorest people in America an extra hundred dollars a week, they wouldn't invest it in mutual fund accounts and start accumulating wealth. But their living standards would go up, that's what matters.

I don't like this modern redefinition of socialism. For more than a hundred years the word socialism was strongly associated with an anti- private business and anti- private property ideology and with planned or collectivized economies. Which, most would agree, are failed ideas that destroy prosperity and freedom.

But apparently I'm wrong for thinking socialism has anything to do with any of that. Apparently, socialism doesn't mean altering the nature of the economy in any way.

Apparently, socialism just means spending slightly more money on public programs. Right now America spends about 20% of the GDP on healthcare, welfare, education, etc that's a pretty capitalist number, but increase that about 10 or 15 percent, and then we'll have "democratic socialism", like Sweden.

What a joke. I'm not saying this is some dastardly plot for real socialism to infiltrate American politics, I think the younger generation is just playing socialist without understanding what they're talking about, and ought to be beaten with history books. Christ, how does someone who's called themselves a socialist since 1960 even get elected Senator?

The right will give them nothing. The left will shut up and defer to them in everything. Whose stage would you take over if you were them and wanted power and attention?

They got to stand on a stage and talk over a major presidential candidate for 5 minutes, instead of being immediately thrown out and having their coats taken by Trump security.

Claiming to be a second vigilante when pressured, claiming to be NATO Russia (lol) and then backtracking and saying he's not really in NATO?

Cenna's pants could melt steel beams.

vote Cenna

unvote Bear obviously.

We're still testing Bear, right? It's a good plan. If Bear is fake and there's a real America, the real America doesn't have to counterclaim and give himself away. We pick someone today and Bear lynches them tonight to prove that he can. Then we have a 100% confirmed townie which is useful even if we don't want to use his power.

I think killing someone who's laying low today is a good idea as any.

28 minutes ago, Bear said:

i Usually don't like repeating myself but Seem like i have to say it Again. random lynch without lead is a quick way for the mafia to have majority over town.

And not lynching is a slow way for the mafia to have a majority over the town. The advantage of the quick method is that it at least has a chance to kill mafia.

Mafia wouldn't be much of a game if the optimal strategy was to just skip every day until everyone's dead or a cop is lucky and solves everything. 

It's a strange thing to advocate for when you seem to know a lot about Mafia. Can you link me to a single game like this where people just nolynched for days? I say we have to lynch someone today, I've got to unvote Robert E Lee and vote Bear.

This leaves Bear with a vote or two left, hold off on the last vote and give him a chance to talk.

I envy his escape. If we're not going to lynch again let's try to make this go faster.

But we should lynch, shouldn't we? It's the only way to kill mafia. I start with vote Robert E Lee

I went through the games just massacring everyone, I had no idea stealth was even possible through the whole game.

I unvote Bear and vote GalacticManatee because @GalacticManatee needs to come out of hiding.

PMFs argument for day 1 lynching doesn't sound unreasonable to me. To not lynch would be to effectively give the mafia an extra night.

I think the recent controversies with Trump are a good example of the problems of thought policing. Every nation has immigration controls and plays favorites with different immigrant groups, nobody has completely open borders because that would be insane. But if you try to enforce or expand immigration laws to a greater level than than the left wants you're a 'racist'. It's the ultimate weapon of suppression, scream 'racist' long enough and loudly enough at anyone who dares to step out of line and maybe you can cow the opposition into submission without any debate or compromise. The worst things Trump has ever said are along the lines of "Immigrant group x is full of bad people, let's stop letting them all in", and that's enough to get him branded as Hitler reincarnate and the ultimate 'racist'. Making 'racism illegal' would be a tool of the majority to completely shut down any social view that they slightly disagree with.

More generally, in principle, I think people ought to be able to think and say just about anything they want. The current 1st Amendment protection in the United States is that you can stand on a street corner with a burning cross and a gun and shout "death to all ****s" - anything short of imminent incitement of likely violence against a specific person is legal. I like that. Does this actually result in more good, in a utilitarian sense, than if we turned the world into a safe space? Maybe and maybe not, but I care more about liberty than I do about the feelings of thin skinned people who can't handle opposition and want to be told what to think.

1 hour ago, Bear said:

From the description, I think that the role list may be that there are a few towns/NATO, a single mafia/ISIS and the rest is neutral. What im thinking is that if an innocent person got killed by a member of NATO then one of the neutral turn into ISIS

But last page LSU said "Lynching will not cause a change to ISIS membership numbers."

Which makes sense, I've never heard of a mafia rule like that, it seems like it would be unbalanced and unfun.