No, but it does make you look like a dick.

If I had to guess, it’s because “other people groups” find benefit for themselves in the use of government power to force people to do things they wouldn’t choose to do on their own- something libertarians are sort of opposed to.

But then, that’s just me.

That’s what I said. It’s also not reasonable to assume that you could do that in an average neighborhood without hitting someone or someone else’s property. Of course, that also depends on how the neighborhood is governed. If the streets, sidewalks, etc. are public property, go nuts to the extent you can without actually causing harm, but if they are owned by the neighborhood HOA, for instance, they can make all the preventative laws they want. Roads, however, are public property, so individual rights of all those using them must be respected. Which includes the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure, so the police have to have reasonable, articulable probable cause to detain someone, which rules out checkpoints and arbitrary limits.

Here is a link to the article I referenced, lest you think I totally pulled all of that out of my ass-

http://www.gonzotimes.com/2010/10/a-problem-of-white-male-anarchism-and-libertariansm-we-must-confront/

Well, I wish you were right about that. I may have gone a bit overboard there, but surely you have noticed that libertarian and anarchist gatherings are attended largely by white males. And my comment about insensitivity to women stems from research I have done elsewhere, as well as a general vibe I have picked up on when listening to some libertarians. Actually there was a story about this recently on a blog called the Gonzo Times, so you might check that out if you get a chance.

Well, seeing as how that demographic is _markedly_ absent from _any_ group of real Libertarians – not pretend wannabes claiming it to try & get laid – my best guess would be that “people get that idea”, (if they do, which I very much doubt) because stupid asses who don’t know what the fuck they’re babbling about run around saying it.

Oh, and Fluffy – don’t go getting the idea this means I’m defending your sorry little posts. It’s a big ol’ internet, and there are a jillion ways of commenting on people/ideas you disagree with. Satire, call-em-a-nazi, reductio ad absurdum……..I myself find ‘pompous windbaggery’ works best for me. (That and obscure ‘Zoolander’ references, of course) But your little ‘shit in a pretty box’ commentary is nothing but rude, entirely unwarranted hostility. Helmut IS dead right about one thing: if you’d just thrown in a few “paradigm”s and “hueristics” into your enraged slobbering fulminations, you’d be a letter-perfect grad school stereotype.

Tales told by an idiot, full of fashionable buzzwords and baseless, inexcusable fury, signifying nothing…..except a sad, angry little person/troll. Good luck with that.

Oh, well then that’s perfectly ok then. LOL! I wonder where people get this wild idea that libertarians are mostly a bunch of white frat boy types that are hostile towards women and their viewpoints? Way to raise the bar Fluffy. And an interesting approach as well. “Lets see, I’m going to show off by using a bunch of technical grad student terms and then I’m gonna keep it real by calling a female poster a cunt.” Classy! I bet you wear a wife beater under your pinstripe suit, yo!

Granted I’m late to the party on this one but it looks like The Agitator comments section took a turn for the worse the last day or so. Glad I missed most of it.

It refers only to arguments in the form, “The speaker has a bad character, therefore we can know his argument is false.”

It most definitely does not refer to arguments that contain personal insults.

So if I offer a syllogistic argument, but take breaks in that argument to indulge my indignation and call you a cunt, that is not the ad hominem fallacy. And in posts #88 and #92, I clearly offered arguments with premises and conclusions, that you have not addressed. My insults were completely incidental and, while self-indulgent, they have no impact (positive or negative) on the substance of the argument itself.

It is very common, on the internet, for very stupid people who don’t know how actual fallacies work to think that any post that includes an insult or a curse is somehow invalidated as being “ad hominem”. But the concept has an actual definition, which you apparently didn’t know. Hopefully you will benefit from my explanation.

One of us looks foolish right now with their argument skills.

It isn’t me.

Go read up on the logical fallacy called argumentum ad hominem.

Go back to me on that, sweetie.

I also think you’re a pathetic pantswetting neurotic who thinks the world is much more dangerous than it actually is, and as a result of your perpetual terror you are obsessed with fantasies of control.

If you were shooting your Thompson straight into the ground, I would submit that yeah, it should be legal. With the exception that it would probably be a noise violation or disturbance of the peace. But it sure wouldn’t be reckless endangerment.

It would become reckless endangerment if you were firing into the distance, because you would lack the ability to determine where your rounds were going. And unless you were in a national forest or out at sea, it would be pretty likely your bullets would be going onto someone else’s property.

You know how many people I’ve killed in 25 years of driving after having a couple of drinks at dinner? None.

The sheer number of passenger miles driven every day in the US escapes people who think that driving with a BAC of .08 (or texting while driving) is some kind of horrific, unspeakably dangerous and antisocial crime. There are lots of drunk driving accidents a year because millions of people drive legally drunk at least once a week. There are texting while driving incidents because millions of drivers are texting while driving every day. Except for drunks and texters who are visibly out of control, the actual delta of decreased safety is trivial. If either of these things was actually that dangerous, it would look like the fucking OMEGA MAN opening around here.

Your reasoning skills and faculty for logical reasoning leave me utterly agape in admiration.

*giggle*

After all, I’m just a brainless hussy who can only be defined by crude schoolyard terms for genitalia.

Under the terms as defined previously, your concerns are irrelevant. It should hypothetically be completely legal to shoot my Thompson anywhere and anytime I like up to the point that somebody or their property is harmed. Of course, that is also utterly insane…just like driving drunk (which manages to kill rather more people then my Thompson).

My Thompson is actually semi auto. It is still a beautiful weapon, of course.

Most of the time that a driver is on the road, driving does not require absolute 100% attention. Good thing, because few people can devote absolute 100% attention to any task without fatigue. One of the problems with drunk driving is that when a situation arises which does require 100% attention, someone who is drunk won’t be able to instantly clear the alcohol from their system to react to it. By contrast, it’s possible for someone who isn’t 100% alert when there aren’t any other vehicles within five seconds of him to quickly become more alert when the five-second cushion drops to three seconds.

While I would not even think of trying to send a text message while driving with the user interface of a typical cell phone, it’s not hard to imagine a better consumer-level communications device which would allow a driver who was en route to a meeting someplace to receive a message like “MEETING RELOCATED TO DAVIDSON CENTER” and punch some buttons to send a reply indicating “message received”, without having to divert his attention from the road for more than half a second at a time. Indeed, many fleet-dispatched vehicles including taxicabs and police cars already include such equipment. A driver who was dealing with a situation which required his full attention could defer his handling of the message more easily than if someone tried to notify him with a voice call.

Yes, it does.

Despite the fact that a brainless cunt upthread compared texting while driving to capital murder, guess what? It’s not capital murder. It’s a behavior that makes driving marginally less safe. It’s a purely statistical crime, and the law is designed to be a purely statistical remediation. There’s absolutely no issue of justice at stake whatsoever. People observed that they believed that texting while driving made driving slightly less statistically safe; in response, they attempted the remediation of making texting while driving illegal.

But that means that the entire measure of whether the law is an appropriate remediation or not is its statistical effect. If accident rates decline, it’s a success. If accident rates rise, it’s a failure. Period.

If you attempted an engineering solution to a particular safety problem and your solution produced worse statistical results than the problem you were attempting to redress, you’d declare your attempt a failure. This is no different.

And there is a cop connection so it is Agitator appropriate.

That said, I also couldn’t really fault someone for shooting back at you if you were walking around a neighborhood firing a Tommy gun. Nor could I fault someone who forcibly took the keys away from someone who was stumbling out of a bar visibly intoxicated. But there is a big difference between that and allowing police to set up checkpoints and arrest anyone who blows over an arbitrary number on a scientifically-suspect device. It’s also yet another good reason for police to be recorded at all times. If you have video evidence of someone who is not in control of their vehicle, by all means pull them over, but this prior restraint bullshit that is the status quo does more harm than good.

This is what I love about the internet. Where else can you get entertainment like this for free?

Sooo…using this logic, walking around my neighborhood randomly shooting my lovely Auto Ordnance Thompson with a 30 round stick mag and .45 caliber FMJ loads should be completely legal.

The only thing that would raise your dander is if I should actually hit somebody or something.

We have gone off the fucking deep end now.