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What is your viewpoint on Guns?

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"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
- George Orwell

one of my favorite Orwell quotes


but personally come on. the only reason the handgun was invented was to take the life of other humans. if someone is going to carry a gun it might as well be a rifle, that way i know they are coming.
 
This glorification of violence is deeply disturbing to me and i am shocked & deeply disappointed that this is a facet of this community.
 
camdemonium said:
This glorification of violence is deeply disturbing to me and i am shocked & deeply disappointed that this is a facet of this community.
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Violence is completely natural. Survival and dominance is won with violence. Ever facet of life on earth somehow uses violence to survive. Everything. Mold, plants, animals everything.

I don't agree with pointless violence but to say no amount is ever necesary is rediculous.
 
Having spent time in Afghanistan I can assure you that the Taliban will not be defeated for several reasons.They may not win but a stalemate is pragmatically as good as a win.

First they have the stomach for the fight which is inevitable when one is defending ones home;any soldier overseas will not have this as a motivating factor.


Secondly, the Afghans are a warrior nation with Islam as their creed but on top of this their culture is well used to fighting.

Third, the Islamic world consists of 1.6 billion people approximately and there will always be no shortage of those who are inclined to give their co-religionists a hand.

Fourth, they have time on their side.

As regards guns and their possession, I reckon if its legal in the country you inhabit then you would be potentially foolish to not become familiar with them and their use.
 
benzyme said:
hell, entropy in the universe is violent, not necessarily pretty and serene. that's just the nature of chaos.
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Yea, and I'd say that some of this entropy is violent and pretty...I mean supernovae and other cosmic catastrophes create incredible beauty when viewed at from a nice safe distance.
 
corpus callosum said:
Having spent time in Afghanistan I can assure you that the Taliban will not be defeated for several reasons.They may not win but a stalemate is pragmatically as good as a win.

First they have the stomach for the fight which is inevitable when one is defending ones home;any soldier overseas will not have this as a motivating factor.


Secondly, the Afghans are a warrior nation with Islam as their creed but on top of this their culture is well used to fighting.

Third, the Islamic world consists of 1.6 billion people approximately and there will always be no shortage of those who are inclined to give their co-religionists a hand.

Fourth, they have time on their side.

As regards guns and their possession, I reckon if its legal in the country you inhabit then you would be potentially foolish to not become familiar with them and their use.
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The fourth argument is the only argument that actually matters.

With the right strategy, their eagerness to fight and die for allah or satan or whatever the creature they worship is called is actually a disadvantage.

Choosing an offensive strategy is actually a weakness. It made the USA lose the war in vietnam.
Being on the offense makes mistakes innevitable.

Time is on their side, but that's because of a strategic choice of the USA.

In the history of warfare, no superiour army ever has chosen a defensive strategy against a geurilla army and that's why guerilla army's always win.

If you reverse the roles, the taliban cannot win and thus they would surely lose. The only thing you'd need is patience wich the USA doesn't have.

If the NATO troops would just sit in afghanistan for an indefinate period of time, eventually the taliban would become more tired of waiting and doing nothing than the NATO troops. You just stated this yourself: they so desperately want to fight.
 
A country like china would actually win such a war as being fought in afghanistan. They are more pragmatic and more cynical than we. They have always won wars by anticipating on their enemy's strengths and turning them into a weakness.

They have defeated enemy's without even ever having a fight.
Just as they're doing with the USA/the western world at this moment in time. Look at their economic policy. They're already way beyon the valuta-war people in the west fantasize about: look at natural resources: oil, gas, iron, etc.

While the USA has spend hundreds of billions of dollars on 'homeland security', the chinese have encouraged this spending, making the USA dig it's own grave.

The chinese have defeated barbarian tribes for thousands of years, and very often with the use of very little violence. The only reason why they have been defeated by europeans for some moments is because of their inner strugles over power.
 
Polytrip says

'with the right strategy their eagerness to fight and die for allah or satan or whatever creature they worship is called is actually a disadvantage'.

This displays a great misunderstanding of what drives them.They fight and die because they have been aggressed against and they believe their reward for this resides with Allah (the God of Islam, Christianity and Judaism-not satan or 'some creature').

To blame the Taliban for the events which led to the war on terror is like blaming the landlord whose accommodation houses a miscreant.To fight them rather than dealing with real issues led to an ostensibly quick victory but as time has shown this is not the end of the story.If the USA had not pressured Saudi Arabia to revoke Bin Ladens citizenship which led to him moving to Sudan, followed by US pressure on Sudan to do the same, he would not have ended up in Afghanistan-a country whose history post the Russian-Afghan war of the 80s depressed and upset him, such that he had no plans to return there.

As the Nexus has been discussing the veracity or otherwise of the media (DMT in a UK newspaper) I think its important and instructive to not take on board everything we are told by the news outlets.The war in Afghanistan is not a defensive war on the part of NATO; NATOs problem is due to, in part, the fact that the Taliban is not a typical guerilla outfit and does consist of many disparate elements who are all labelled as Taliban.Many of those who have taken up arms do so as revenge for having had non-combatant relatives killed by NATO in its actions and many of these fighters have no overwhelming religious zeal.The Wests lack of understanding of the culture of the place is part of its problem in making progress there.


With regards to China, they are on the up;I think that their growing advocacy of free market economics will serve them well for a time but they too will be made to suffer.This is inevitable when the system has money as a commodity(ie money can be made via interest rather than providing anything of inherent material value) rather than simply as a means of exchange.
 
corpus callosum said:
Polytrip says

'with the right strategy their eagerness to fight and die for allah or satan or whatever creature they worship is called is actually a disadvantage'.

This displays a great misunderstanding of what drives them.They fight and die because they have been aggressed against and they believe their reward for this resides with Allah (the God of Islam, Christianity and Judaism-not satan or 'some creature').

To blame the Taliban for the events which led to the war on terror is like blaming the landlord whose accommodation houses a miscreant.To fight them rather than dealing with real issues led to an ostensibly quick victory but as time has shown this is not the end of the story.If the USA had not pressured Saudi Arabia to revoke Bin Ladens citizenship which led to him moving to Sudan, followed by US pressure on Sudan to do the same, he would not have ended up in Afghanistan-a country whose history post the Russian-Afghan war of the 80s depressed and upset him, such that he had no plans to return there.

As the Nexus has been discussing the veracity or otherwise of the media (DMT in a UK newspaper) I think its important and instructive to not take on board everything we are told by the news outlets.The war in Afghanistan is not a defensive war on the part of NATO; NATOs problem is due to, in part, the fact that the Taliban is not a typical guerilla outfit and does consist of many disparate elements who are all labelled as Taliban.Many of those who have taken up arms do so as revenge for having had non-combatant relatives killed by NATO in its actions and many of these fighters have no overwhelming religious zeal.The Wests lack of understanding of the culture of the place is part of its problem in making progress there.


With regards to China, they are on the up;I think that their growing advocacy of free market economics will serve them well for a time but they too will be made to suffer.This is inevitable when the system has money as a commodity(ie money can be made via interest rather than providing anything of inherent material value) rather than simply as a means of exchange.
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I don't see how this contradicts my claim that NATO/america has been blundering strategically.

It's strategic blunders like supporting the mujahadeen against the russians that eventually brought them in afghanistan, it's strategic blunders like fighting the opium trade and rob the locals of their income, terrorising the country with heavy bombs like those 'daisy cutters' that doesn't realy win hearts and minds as intended, it's all strategic blunders.

I'm on the opinion that if you break something, you got to fix it, or pay for the repair. The west has broken quite some stuff in afghanistan so i do think we have some sort of moral obligation to fix as much of it as we can.

That will automatically mean you have to fight some segments of the taliban, because the more deranged parts of the taliban don't like the idea of having broken things fixed. Anarchy and extreme poverty legitimizes their totalitarian way's of ruling the country, so that's why they want the country to stay poor and they want the anarchy to remain.

This means that the west has the moral obligation to fight at least the segment of the taliban that want's to stop every attempt to restore order and to restore the demolished infrastructure. Making the distinction between taliban that want's the country to bloom and the taliban that wants the country to suffer would have made sense. It's all to late for that now. At this moment the western troops might as well leave because there's little good left for them to do.

I don't believe the 'war against terror' is being fought or won in afghanistan. But i do think we should have done something to help the people over there, once we made the decission to mingle with local business.

I find everything the west has done so far with regards to afghanistan a total shame and i would be very much in favor of anything that would at least compensate a bit of all the damage we've done.

I'm deeply dissapointed in the obama administration. It seems as if the white house and it's generals can't agree on anything and to make matters worse, all NATO allies can't agree on anything either. It seems they don't have a clue about what they want and how they want to do it.
 
Polytrip-my point in the last post was to show that your thoughts on why the Taliban were fighting (ie for god/satan/'creature') was wrong.

NATO are blundering strategically-you are right about that.As for supporting the Mujahideen in the war of the 80s, may I suggest you read a little about the US security secretatary of state who held the post in the late 70s-a chap named Zbigniew Brezhinski ( I hope Ive spelt it right).This man wrote his memoirs a couple of years ago and he states the US was financing Islalmic radicals around 1978 in Afghanistan to induce Russia to invade and have, as he put it, their Vietnam'.

His thinking was short-sighted but did serve the immediate purpose of screwing up the USSR and hence contribute significantly to their decline.

But the US is an inept puppet-master; it thought by rallying the Islamic world under the banner of Jihad (and I recall Jimmy Carter saying the Afghan-Russian war was a legitimate Jihad) it could use them solely for its own ends at will.It is this insincerity which has come back to haunt them.
 
One further point- from where did you come to the conclusion that some Taliban want the country to suffer? The media me thinks.

Remember the state of the country when the Taliban seized power? Warlordism with no security, rape and pillage, the wholesale bombing of Kabul killing thousands etc etc.When they took over the place was free of these things and security prevaile.This is not to say that they didnt do fairly heinous things but to conclude they actively wanted the country to suffer is just media-driven gibberish.They sought recognition by the UN and were declined; they were courted by the US oil companies in order to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan to Karachi and onwards to the world, therby bypassing Iran and Russia.

Yes, they were not a democratic liberal government but to state they actively sought chaos is grossly mistaken.
 
corpus callosum said:
One further point- from where did you come to the conclusion that some Taliban want the country to suffer? The media me thinks.

Remember the state of the country when the Taliban seized power? Warlordism with no security, rape and pillage, the wholesale bombing of Kabul killing thousands etc etc.When they took over the place was free of these things and security prevaile.This is not to say that they didnt do fairly heinous things but to conclude they actively wanted the country to suffer is just media-driven gibberish.They sought recognition by the UN and were declined; they were courted by the US oil companies in order to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan to Karachi and onwards to the world, therby bypassing Iran and Russia.

Yes, they were not a democratic liberal government but to state they actively sought chaos is grossly mistaken.
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I base my opinions on muslim radicals mostly on what friends of me who're moderate muslims tell me. Most of the moderate muslims i know see the radicals as people who're not driven by islam but rather by selfishness and their big ego's. The common held view is that these people first decide that they want to become a hero, a marter and thus want to blow things up and kill themselves and as many other people as possible and then, after having decided to do this they find some excuse or reason why this would serve islam. No matter who they kill or when or where, there's always some twisted reason to claim that it's an act of martyrdom. If they kill muslims they say that a good muslim isn't afraid to die in allah's name, for instance. So this justifies for them to kill as many muslims as possible in the name of allah, because every muslim who would make an objection is by this twisted logic automatically a bad muslim who thus deserves to die.
In circles of moderate muslims (at least in holland) fundamentalists are even more the subject of mockery and ridicule, than the european far-right anti-islam party's. They are seen as hypocrits and opportunists who're solely driven by their own ego and who help the anti-islam movement to grow. They are seen as people who lie, who abuse islam. They can cite the koran, but only for their own purposes.

Most muslims don't like to openly critisize other muslims because they have a cultural background where freedom of speech is not as an accepted good as for most westerners. But their views on fundamentalists are not very different from that of the western media. I would say their loathing for these people goes even deeper.
 
Anyway, i still think we (the west that is) should try to restore the damage that we've done. And i also think that this would mean that we have to fight against some of the taliban. If they blow-up schools that have just been rebuild, and i don't think claims that they do these sort of things are western propaganda, than they stand in the way of the countries ressurection.

Maybe western troops aren't the right people anymore to rebuild afghanistan, after all the suffering they've caused. In that case we should maybe just finance it and let others do the job, if there are other that are willing and able.

But just to leave and let the country fall apart again, and it very much looks like it that this is the current plan, would be just immoral.

We've violated so many principles there that we always claim are sacred to us. There's no doubt about it that the west has commited war-crimes in afghanistan. We should pay for it one way or another. And i don't care if that would mean sending troops or sending money, as long as it would help the country to recover.
 
camdemonium said:
This glorification of violence is deeply disturbing to me and i am shocked & deeply disappointed that this is a facet of this community.
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Complete peace in mother nature leads to imbalances. Violence keeps everything in check.

Unnecessary violence can suck a phat one though.
 
polytrip said:
Anyway, i still think we (the west that is) should try to restore the damage that we've done. And i also think that this would mean that we have to fight against some of the taliban. If they blow-up schools that have just been rebuild, and i don't think claims that they do these sort of things are western propaganda, than they stand in the way of the countries ressurection.

Maybe western troops aren't the right people anymore to rebuild afghanistan, after all the suffering they've caused. In that case we should maybe just finance it and let others do the job, if there are other that are willing and able.

But just to leave and let the country fall apart again, and it very much looks like it that this is the current plan, would be just immoral.

We've violated so many principles there that we always claim are sacred to us. There's no doubt about it that the west has commited war-crimes in afghanistan. We should pay for it one way or another. And i don't care if that would mean sending troops or sending money, as long as it would help the country to recover.
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Doing any ressurection there is useless now. I say secure resources (or whatever business) and get out. That is what 'they' were doing anyway...
I dont buy the democracy crap.

How demoralising it must be for the young officer who has just build that school...

Reminds me of this scene from the Apocalypse Now... about horror and judgement, and what is necessary in war.
 
The debate of whether weaponry is to blame or the people using them are is a flawed one. Both subjects hold an equal part in the destruction of lives.

I suppose it all comes down to the human though, and their point of view and level of respect for others lives.

Maybe instead of firearm education, we begin the ever so desperately needed, respect of life teachings in school.

I'm having trouble recalling any instance whilst growing up when I was taught by someone other than my parents to learn to respect mother nature, and all living things, yet I can clearly remember a time when teachers, and students alike rallied to have a gun safety course in school.

Although the students rallying for it, were merely in it for the fun of shooting.
 
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