*** Official Politics Shitposting Thread ***

[Jack Sawyer]

Implicit from your stance is that when a person has a measure of a motive to slaughter, threatening his ability to slaughter doesn't affect the measure of the motive. I (and most people) do not find that logical or credible. Do you find that logical and credible?

No. My stance is, less guns overall, less shootings overall. No ands, ifs nor buts. My stance is backed by numerous factual real world examples, including e.g. darling Aussieland.


Your stance, as I understand it, is gun-free zones, therefore places with a drastically reduced amount of guns, are targets for those with a measure of a motive to slaughter and therefore resulting in more shootings. Implicit from your stance, more guns would (in those places) result in less shootings (because of the implied threat of being shot during an attack by someone holding a concealed firearm). I personally find that not logical nor credible, basing my opinion and conclusion on the matter on other real world examples and historical facts. Shit already went down in other places, and institutions have already dealt with them with varying degrees of success.


Shit already went down in other places, and institutions have already dealt with them with varying degrees of success.


I ask you to back your stance with actual facts because of the aforementioned reasons. Why would you think such (an) illogical thing(s)? You, in turn, also find my stance "not logical nor credible", yet offer no actual, factual, verifiable example as to on what you are basing this opinion on. To me, it seems you are thinking with feel-good emotions and not with logic nor reason.

To specifically address your claim that pointing out cognitive dissonances is ad hominem, I don't think it is. Ad hominem is when essentially you attack the person instead of the argument. When I point out cognitive dissonances, I have no intention of addressing the person making them, but to address the argument. It's like this: if you get straw manned, pointing out that the person erected a straw man is not ad hominem. Pointing out the straw man is useful to understand what is and what isn't addressing the arguments and it can help keep the subsequent arguments relevant to the original arguments.

You appear to be more concerned with detecting and referencing logical fallacies rather than with the actual substance of what is being debated

The other day I saw a billboard that sparked disagreement in me. I went on about a ten minutes intellectual exercise explaining why the claim of the billboard was wrong, but then I realized my very first response to the claim was cognitive dissonance on my own part. That means that the rest of my argument was basically irrelevant. I was arguing against an illusion.

This doesn't surprise me one bit, and I am glad you realized it on your own. That takes character; to admit being wrong to oneself after realizing it

How does one go about solving for cognitive dissonance? It can be hard, but it's doable. Take a step back and address the claim head on, like yes or no and why it is or isn't true. Then if you want to make a different argument that carries with it implication that the impact of the previous claim is not that important, that's fine.


Simply just sidestepping the claim and presenting a new claim masquerading as a response to the original claim is how most arguments seem to go, and it never gets anywhere.

I try to understand the issues first, try and see of historical precedence, what has been done to fix said issues already and which measure of succes said attempt(s) had, and try to implement tried and true solutions to solve it. Nothing is new under the sun; teachings are only lost to be rediscovered later. Like Damascus or wootz steel.

Does somebody who wants to kill a lot of people target a place where he assesses very low probability of success regarding killing a lot of people with the same frequency that he targets a place where he assesses a very high probability of success regarding killing a lot of people?

Assuming the mass killer is rational. That's a bit of a stretch for mass killers. It's perhaps less so for serial killers. I hope you can clearly see why.

Laws are not to prevent all crimes.
No system of law will result in a world (or neighborhood) without crimes.

Clearly you've never seen nor read Minority Report. That's a terryfying all-too-possible future though

Look at it like this. Let's say somebody benefits $20/hr of value* thieving non-alarm cars and it costs him $15/hr of value. Let's say his next best option (the option he would choose if he wasn't thieving cars) benefits him $15 and costs $13. He nets more personal value by thieving non-alarm cars than his next best option, so he thieves non-alarm cars. But then people start installing alarms and he has to start skipping cars. Let's say that this makes his value of thieving non-alarm cars drop to $19 and his cost increases to $16. He still nets 50% more than his next best option, so he still thieves cars. But then let's say every car gets an alarm, so he has no choice but to deal with an alarm if he wishes to thieve cars. Let's say this reduces his benefit to $18 and increases cost to $17. Now he experiences 33% of the value thieving cars that he does by not thieving cars. So then he stops thieving cars.**


* Value essentially encompasses every bit of preference the person could possibly have.


**We know that he would stop thieving cars because each of the payoffs accounts for every element. If he were to not stop thieving cars when his benefit of not thieving cars passes his benefit of thieving cars, it would mean that the presented payoff structure does not correctly assess his preferences in the first place.

Whenever I see this kind of reasoning, it makes me think along these lines


https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ubris-disaster

Economics, this seems to say, is not a social science but an exact one, like physics or chemistry – a distinction that not only encourages hubris among economists but also changes the way we think about the economy.


A Nobel prize in economics implies that the human world operates much like the physical world: that it can be described and understood in neutral terms, and that it lends itself to modelling, like chemical reactions or the movement of the stars. It creates the impression that [strong]economists are not in the business of constructing inherently imperfect theories, but of discovering timeless truths.[/strong]

And even better

After the crash hit, Greenspan appeared before a congressional committee in the US to explain himself. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” said the man whom fellow economists used to celebrate as “the maestro”.


In other words, Greenspan had been unable to imagine that bankers would run their own bank into the ground. Had the maestro read the tiny pile of books by financial anthropologists he may have found it easier to imagine such behaviour. Then he would have known that over past decades banks had adopted a “zero job security” hire-and-fire culture, breeding a “zero-loyalty” mentality that can be summarised as: “If you can be out of the door in five minutes, your horizon becomes five minutes.”

Illustrating that his models couldn't really predict the one outcome which everyone else not bubbled by this kind of thinking could have foreseen like Nostradamus himself. And yet this kind of bubbled thinking, in the position he was, lead to infamous the crash of '08. And still, he was/is incapable of admitting he fucked up.


Theories are nice. The real world, however, always finds a new, undetected variable to throw into the mix, to make these social-totally-not-social theories baloney. So while they are nice, one is sadly mistaken to think of them as gospel. Which is why I prefer to observe, see where it has already happened, see how it has already been dealt with, and copy/paste said succesful measure(s), hoping to possibly add something better to the mix in the process as well.








Sorry about the derail. It got too long and I didn't really care about editing anymore. Carry on with the political shitposting