Mass shooting at Oregon college: 15+ dead...

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I didn't mean you when I said 'you', I meant people in general. Sorry if I gave that impression.
What I meant was that you hear so much talk about this and that problem, but you never see anyone doing anything. This really tweaks my tail. If there is a problem, don't you correct it?

Actually there were many peaceful people who attempted real change in the '60s. The shrewd government was able to turn public opinion against us (called us dirty hippies, etc.) to deflect the public's attention, but we gave it a good try. I don't know if or when the people's chance will come again. Unless you're a billionaire don't expect politics to ever work in your favor.

Hey ZenDen, it's good to see an original hippie here. I've had the pleasure to know many growing up. It is one of the most peaceful and accepting groups I know.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that there are a lot of younger people that are carrying on with what your generation kick started. Peaceful protest and opposition to oligarchy are alive and well. Just look at the crowds Senator Sanders is drawing.

The media is still smearing us though, especially fox news. But hey what can you do?

Any organic people's movements get co-opted by the establishment almost the second the media starts paying attention to them now, they'll co-opt and muddy anything remotely threatening. If not ignored you will be derided as crazy and or stupid.

The charade is wearing thin, with the internet they cannot control the free access of information and with that they are losing control of the narrative. There is a HUGE disconnect between the American people and the politicians elected to represent them.

Sorry, man, there just isn't a way to BS away from this graph's badness.

It's a very simple graph that's the equivalent of standing on your head with night-vision goggles and announcing that the world is upside-down, monochrome, and glowy. Also, if you're going to wave BS in my face by making it giant, then yes, I will likely notice it preferentially.

It wants to talk about gun homicides while ignoring gun suicides, far and away the largest cause of gun death.

It wants to pretend that the rise in gun ownership is responsible for the drop in gun homicide since 1993, when in fact it's well-known that all crime has dropped precipitously since 1993, and that *nobody knows why*. Not because people are standing around shrugging, but because after a lot of study, the people who study these things are forced to admit that they really do not know why crime across the board is down. They have some guesses. Gun proliferation as a reason is on the map only for gun rights activists.

It wants to decontextualize America and help you forget that we have, next to the rest of the world, a positively obscene gun death rate, and that something is clearly wrong in what we're doing. Again, not an inactive subject of study.

I'm not looking at the graph right now, because this is the last post I'll make on the subject, but I would guess that the scale is also truncated mightily so that this homicide-rate drop looks precipitious when in fact it's not, and that it's way out of proportion to the opposing scale, the one in gun ownership. And that if you rectified that situation the picture would look very different.

So yeah, distortion and cherrypicking of facts by an interested party to promote a preferred view in a simplistic, highly memorable manner? That's pretty much the textbook definition of propaganda.

Okay, I have a life to go live. Enjoy turning yourself into a pretzel to defend something indefensible. I think the political reality is that your time's just up on this issue, anyhow.

I have also felt the benefit of living in a community of decent people in the past and aim to move back to one soon.

Unfortunately where I live currently I am very much an outsider. As a result of standing up for what is right I have been subjected to harassment, vandalism and criminal damage to our home and threats of violence. I am very well aware of the importance of making a stand and, if standing alone, what the results are likely to be too.

'Exceptional'? Apart from being exceptionally violent (not to mention deluded when it comes to gun control), you are not above the rest of us poor sods on planet Earth.

If I were a betting man I'd bet that the typical Australian knows a helluva lot more about the United States than the average American even cares to know about Australia. It's not that we're uninformed but that your country, by comparison, is just insigificant.

You forgot to put "knows" in quotation marks.

Most Americans freely admit to knowing little about the rest of the world, and for that they are derided as ignorant and insular. But between Hollywood shoot-em-ups and the international media, most of which is somewhere to the left of the Daily Worker, many foreigners have an image of life in the US which bears little resemblance to reality.

I meant more about the individual states and our national history. I bet the average Aussie could find several states on a map of the US and know who Thomas Jefferson and Booker T. Washington was. They know probably that Yosemite is in California, Mt. Rushmore is in S. Dakota, and that Monticello is in Virginia.

Could the average American find Queensland or Victoria on a map?
Would the average American know where Uluru is or even what it is?
Do they even know who the current PM is?
They probably did know at one time but there's just not enough significance there to keep them in mind for long.
That's what I'm talking about.

I'm afraid there are quite a few Americans who couldn't find Australia on a globe. Or demonstrate any of the knowledge of their own country in your first paragraph.

If only we had a government-run educational system … oh wait …

I was talking on the average. Dumbasses exist in all societies.

I think this was meant to be an insult, although I am not sure. Not that it matters, because I completely understand how insignificant the nation that I just happen to live in actually is when it comes to world affairs. The Russian foreign minister was reported to have said that he was "not at all concerned with minnows" when our silly foreign minister tried to apply pressure on Russia over the MH17 affair. He no doubt thinks the Ukraine is more important, and from the perspective of the Russian government, it is. There are too many people where I live, especially our politicians, who seem to believe that when someone from this country makes an official statement the rest of the world pays attention. Well, no, they just ignore us, or do this -

Anyway, I am quite sure there were many who sincerely believed the Roman, and later on the British Empire, were also 'exceptional' and above the possibility of natural catastrophe and decline, and yet this belief did not save them, because they were simply wrong about this. The two most important nations on Earth within the near future will be China and India, if we make the - perfectly reasonable - assumption that their very large populations will continue to grow at the pace they currently are, whilst Europe, Russia and the U.S. will slowly wither away. The trends are all there now, there is no escaping it.

The United States of America is the only self-created country in the world. Your country grew out of a colony. Our ancestors threw off English tyranny and established a political form never seen before, a form of government that has lasted over 200 years.
All other countries have either evolved from preexisting political bodies and/or systems, or are made up of the remnants of the European colonies.
To say we are like every other two-bit former English colony is certainly laughable.
Raptor made a good point. You Aussies know about us because we are significant. We don't know about you because you don't signify.

Glebel our country grew out of 13 colonies. So we evolved from the previous British establishment. The thing that was supposed to make our country exceptional is that we were the first modern democracy. The only thing that is making us exceptional among first world nation is the massive amount of gun massacres. People are people and mostly the same all over the world.

Massive?