You argue there’s risk in conflating one type of mass shooting with another (domestic violence or criminal pursuit vs. ‘rampaging’) because it changes how policy would be considered, while simultaneously conflating two very different types of mass shooting (psychological instability vs. ideological terrorism) as one and the same. The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.

From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.

If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong. It’s not tenable as far as I can see. You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.

Are you saying that we should have Allowlists vs. Denylists for types of gun violence that are acceptable? This seems to be the fundamental premise upon which we disagree…

From my POV, intention is immaterial because there are no ‘good’ gun deaths, so splitting hairs has no values.

It sounds to me like you’re saying if you go to a mall and have a mass shooting in a totally sober state, that’s bad, but if you get hopped up on bath salts and then have a good old fashioned shotgun rampage, that’s ok and we shouldn’t count those ones…

Your explaining the difference but not explaining why it makes a difference.

To matters of gun regulation, of safety in public spaces, of trauma to the affected, of national reputation (pick any one, or all, or something else) why does the intent change anything?

I’ll start off: To have the intention to mass-murder purely for the sake of mass murder could be worth isolating and studying because that is a specific and extreme psychological problem worth solving. However, not all mass killings (with intent, for your sake) will have that psychological trigger at root. A religious or racial extremist, for example, is different than a disaffected teenager.

In this circumstance, intent is interesting if one is interested in those other things (psychological issues in American youth, the spread of religious and racial extremism), but ultimately are secondary issues when it comes to measuring gun violence. A mass stabbing by a racial extremist, or a teenager blowing up their high school with fertilizer would still need to be measured.

You are complaining about this organization’s yardstick, but I don’t hear a compelling alternative from you for this specific measure. You are saying they should be measuring a totally different thing, which is arguably irrelevant to this measure.

I’m not sure I understand why intent matters (barring accidents, I suppose)?

Who cares what the intent was if guns were involved and people were hurt or died?

If a person is suffering from schizophrenia and thinks they are holding a magic wand, but actually shoot up a mall, they don’t have intent but the gun violence still resulted in death. Would that not be a mass shooting in your intent-based definition?

I was gonna come in here like 'Phone with a physical keyboard' but then I realized I had greatly misread the room…

A strong second for Weawow. What a great weather app.

Where is the line?

We interact with hundreds if not thousands of chemicals in every ordinary act of life. This is not just unavoidable, it's normal and natural, and has been going on for centuries if not millenia.

Are you proposing we stop cooking food (which results in chemical alterations of the underlying food). What about soap?

You have a point, but you've oversimplified it and taken it to an extreme where it's no longer a sound or balanced idea.

Look…

Not a remake, but there's a sequel on the way… I'm not super hopeful but maybe I'll be surprised? Flashback did get a remaster and release on (at least) Switch, but i found the controls unintuitive and dissatisfying. It was a bummer.

Given what happened with Merrick Garland, it's not fully clear that her retiring would have ensured the outcome you're suggesting.

Technically true, but it needs to be non militarized, can't purchase the missile mounts (or the missiles etc.). My point stands.

But this already isn't true. Even if I could afford it, I can't buy an F16, anthrax or a nuclear warhead. So, isn't this just about where the line is being drawn? The line itself both already exists and doesn't seem to be contested.

Blackbeard's Ghost. Watchable on Disney+ right now. Family friendly, great performances and some epic physical comedy from Peter Ustinov (voice of Prince John in Disney's Robin Hood).

I will also accept "I am rubber, you are glue" as a possible answer.

Anything related to hamsters and/or the smell of elderberries.

If you think 'a bit of my statue broke' is even a rounding error compared to their legacy in the Congo, I suggest you go look into it and let me know once you've done the research if you think I'm wrong. I'm open to hearing your counter-argument, but from my view the two do not compare.

I disagree. The rich got richer, there's no doubt about that, but (using England as an example), a massive amount of infrastructure was built and paid for through colonial income in part of not whole. Roads, trains, factories, ships, universities. Much of the money that went into long lasting projects like that depended on the continual income from the colonies.

That infrastructure benefits the entire country, even though the poor are still poor. They are poor with trains to take them places and roads to drive on. They are poor with universities to create new medicines to treat them. That benefit is meaningful, it is pervasive, and it didn't just materialize spontaneously – another group of people somewhere do not have something today as a result of that transfer of resources.

I agree that Germany's hand was forced because they lost the war, but as a counter-example, the Japanese also lost the war, and they have done very little to acknowledge any of the negative actions they committed during WWII – so losing the war wasn't the only variable here. Turkey lost, but continue to deny their role in the Armenian genocide. Both those nations have made a choice where others have not.

I agree with you that this is not how things have been forever. It probably does go back to the Holocaust. That's not a reason to not do things. We are constantly changing things about human societal structure. Why not include an understanding of how destructive colonialism was and how it impacts the economic and cultural variances between nations today?

Much of how Germany handles their role in WWII in terms of public consciousness was not placed upon them by the Allies. Initially Germany tried to distance itself from responsibility by blaming what happened only on the Nazi party and not on those who were not party members or high ranking party members.

It took time for them to start to instill in their culture the idea that they had to grapple with the Holocaust meaningfully, not because any of them were at fault, but because they still had a responsibility to know and prevent. It's not perfect, and like I said before, nothing is, but it's more than doing nothing.

That culture of ownership, in my mind, is far better than reparations. The resources are gone. You can't (or perhaps, shouldn't) unbuild a railway system. But to ignore the past and pretend nothing happened and that (mostly) European nations have no long lasting responsibility for the state of much of the developing world is, in my opinion, totally wrong.

To your point, do you think the average teenager in England understands how the policies of their leadership caused the Potato Famine? More importantly, do you think it's a good thing that they should never have to learn that and recognize that England has something today because Ireland does not?

Returning to Belgium, statues of Leopold were still present and commemorated until they were attacked by fringe activists fairly recently. That's a signal to me that they don't know their history. I'm sure if they did, it wouldn't be a group of radicals trying to bring attention to this subject, it would be a more widely and normally accepted conversation with their past selves.

Not sure where I suggested destroying the statue would even the karmic scales, I just said I didn't feel bad for them (due to their current karmic bank balance). Those are two totally different things.

Sorry I don't understand your comment.

Firstly, I said nothing of reparations. I talked about owning the responsibility. That can take the form of education, it can take the form of reparations, it has many forms. All those forms are imperfect, but they are each better than doing nothing because 'hey, it was a long time ago, man.'

Second, to this point:

The rank and file who pay the taxes in the western countries were being subjugated also and certainly did not gain from the moneys raised in the colonies.

That's just not true, friend. Just because economic injustice exists in colonizing counties today and existed then, doesn't mean their rank and file aren't still benefitting from the actions of their prodecessors. Their infrastructure, their economies, their sociopolitical systems – stuff that the enables the rank and file to worry about paying taxes instead of, for example, starving and dying in a civil war – that is the benefit that has been created. To take that for granted is to bury how that got built.