the title

  • sootlion [any]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    The idea that spreading guns everywhere is a good idea and helps the revolution. If you're starting a leftist army, sure please arm them that's an unfortunate necessity, otherwise literal death machines only really do one thing: make more people die (and very likely is that the very owner of the death machine or their family is the one who will die).

    Secondly, most of urbanism are obsessed with packing everyone in massive concrete superstructures, and laud places like London and Paris which are overcrowded hellholes as somewhat well-used space. I've been to both cities many times and have friends there, they're very cool cities, but living in either is not a physically nor mentally healthy lifestyle for 90+% of people.

    Come at me nerds.

    • Avanash [they/them]
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      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I’m very excited about China’s efforts to modernize rural living. My sensory issues are intense. I love visiting the city and all the amenities that affords. Public transport, the ability to walk places, everything staying open longer, more niche hobby activities being more accessible. But visiting for a week throws me off for the rest of the month. Even in “quiet” cities, the sensory overload is a lot.

      • sootlion [any]
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        2 years ago

        I 100% relate to that, modernised rural living sounds cool, I'm sold.

      • sootlion [any]
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        2 years ago

        To be fair, aye, I think I understand see the point you're making. Maybe it's just more of a US thing, because very few people (including cops) have guns here in Euroland.

        Still, if this is the main reason, I get why you'd want guns in that environment, but parallel to that surely should be the desire to tighten gun control laws to a similar point - restrict guns down so neither rightwingers nor police have so many in the first place. As successfully works elsewhere.

    • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
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      2 years ago

      Also from what I've heard, being armed is actually more dangerous than being unarmed a lot of the time. If someone threatens you with a knife or a gun while you're unarmed, you might get mugged or beaten up. If both of you have a gun, it's a lot more likely that someone's gonna panic and one of you is not making it out alive. The mere act of having a weapon already serves to escalate the situation.

      Now of course, in the specific scenario where the attacker is looking to hate crime you from the get-go, having a gun is obviously preferable, but generally speaking a gun does not make you safer in the streets.

        • sootlion [any]
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          edit-2
          2 years ago

          It may be impossible to prove without some ethically questionable experiments, but the evidence is still pretty strong that merely owning a gun greatly increases your chance of being killed.

          I've never really understood the self-defence argument for every day living, if someone comes at you with a gun and intends to shoot you, I suspect they'd shoot you, whether or not you have a gun. The chance of you being aware of that threat beforehand, having the time and opportunity to get your own weapon, ready it for use, and then effectively use it to ward off that threat are gonna be really low, and basically all the time will be worse odds than just running away. Add to that the pretty high chance of being shot with your own gun in the first place, and I very much question that it improves your odds of surviving any given year.

    • StalinForTime [comrade/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      We will quite literally need weapons to win. We will not win if the left is not armed. Power is born out of the barrel of a gun. No ruling class has ever surrendered its power without being forced, let alone altruistically.

      Ofc this is not exactly what you've said, as you've mentioned 'arming everyone'. But if the solution is not winning control over militaries where the weapons are contained through elections, which is likely because electorialism is utter bullshit in the long run, then the only solutions are forming people's armies and/or radicalizing the armed forces to form part of them. I don't think it's at all clear how in those conditions of social breakdown we'd be able to keep any kind of lid on the proliferation of guns, especially in the US. Ofc the issue there is also that most of the people with guns are not on our side.

      The solution to high populations definitely does include high-rises I feel, and that's for economic reasons and precisely to avoid overcrowding, even through its obviously extremely imperfect as it currently is. The other solution is to have low density housing more spread, and have services and infastructure spread out to faciliate that. But that's massive program and I'm not clear on how well it could be done.

      Also, very importantly, a big reason those cities, like others, have housing issues is not because they don't have enough actual housing. It's because so much of that housing is either lived in by the bourgeoisie as one of their many homes, and/or is owned as purely speculative financial asset instead of being used for living, or is used for the offices of some useless, bullshit modern enterprise. I don't know how much you've seen of the interiors of people of different classes in London or Paris, but it would be similar to other dense cities where the bourgeois take up immensely more space per person, and they're often not even there.

      I'm a city rat tho so even tho I'm fully aware of how alienating and bad a modern metropolis if for your health I still immensely value having access to so much in a relatively small space.

      • sootlion [any]
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        2 years ago

        I mean, you've explicitly mentioned people's armies or radicalised armed forces, and as I said, I totally get that firearms are a necessary part of that, that's fine.

        I take the points on cities, but I see no reason to think successful spread out rural services and infrastructure aren't achievable, they're already fairly successful in many parts of the world. I do also take your point that some people enjoy living in the cities despite the downsides, that's fine too. I think we can probably agree both rural and urban life have room for major improvement if they could be without the bourgeois nonsense dragging it down.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
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      2 years ago

      I’m so mixed on guns, but I think I’ve come to a solid belief.

      In an ideal world, I want no one to own guns. Police shouldn’t have them, individuals shouldn’t have them, and militaries should be as small as possible.

      However, I live in the United States in 2023. And in the United States in 2023, the people who want me and my loved ones dead have lots and lots of guns. So I would like the people on my side to also have guns.

      But also I absolutely cannot own one myself, first off I have a medical weed card which disqualifies me, but also I’m far more likely to use it on myself than anyone else.

    • KnockYourSocksOff [none/use name]
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      2 years ago

      Explaining my stance on guns is exhausting. But to put it simply, I just do the nasal exhale whenever someone suggests that "we need guns for protection" and a dozen kids die the next month, and no one ends up safer, and the cycle continues.

    • grey_wolf_whenever [he/him]
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      2 years ago

      with you on guns but I think writing off London & Paris as 'hell holes' is absolutely a shitty chud take sorry.