Posts by Kyle Matthews
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You’re not about to bring down anything by using an ad-blocker as an individual – but if everyone took the same stance as you, there wouldn’t be any Scoop to rely on. You may wish to consider parallels with, say, taxes and resource use. Or at least come down from that high horse.
Aye. I don't think I've ever clicked through on an internet advert, and I fast forward through TV adverts very happily. But I recognise that they're part of how the system works. They're the reasonable side of making money off the internet, as compared to the spam and scams that proliferate.
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Andrew Campbell (Green Party) and Ian MacKenzie (Federated Farmers) on Summer Nine to Noon with Noelle this morning, talking about the issues of this blog: MP3 file (Other Options)
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(My half-sister, who is an absolutely raving born-again Christian and as Republican as they come, *did* actually move here for a year in the mid-eighties because of family stuff but quickly returned to the States – after removing her four children from public school because we taught evolution. I am not kidding.)
I have a distant memory of someone bringing their niece to school one day for a visit, and their niece was several months older than them. It was such a curious thing at the time I still remember it. Was that you?
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Oh, and the difference between incrementalism and a slippery slope? Is right there in the metaphor. It’s the difference between a series of steps – any one of which may be anybody’s stopping point – and an actual slippery slope, where stepping on at all means going the rest of the way. That’s why it’s called a “slippery slope”.
Exactly Emma. You can make links from 1960s - 1970s from civil rights to womens rights to gay rights. The creation of an environment in which equal rights were raised and granted and battles fought and won creates space and momentum for battles on other fronts. Indeed many of the first second-wave feminists were female activists from the new left whose first battles in the sphere were being unhappy about how they were dominated and ruled by men in their activist groups.
But did American society slide down an inevitable slope from a Woolworths in Greensboro through bra burning to Stonewall? Clearly not. Lots of issues sitting on that slope weren't picked up and won at the time.
Civil Unions certainly made same sex marriage easier - the issues are clearly closely linked. Same sex marriage might make polyamory marriages easier to happen, but that's unclear. But they're conscious steps and choices and we'll clearly reserve the right to skip parts of the 'slippery slope' as other societies did.
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If so, it was Law School itself telling them the porkies.
Law Schools don't have much at all to do with admission to the bar, so any advice that students received while at university would be informal/gossip. Law students are a fairly tight bunch so a lot of that goes around.
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I realise others in this thread can actually answer this question, so I don’t intend it to be rhetorical: What more could have been done from a mental health angle?
My theory is:
1. There are valid reasons to own and have guns. Not to the extent which they tend to have them in the states, but we want to restrict access to guns to suit what people need them for - hunting, farming, recreation etc. This is a balancing act between community control and individual freedoms.
2. There is nothing good about a person suffering from a mental illness going crazy and attacking or hurting other people, regardless of whether they use guns, knives, bombs etc. There's no balance here, we want to eliminate this problem from our society entirely.
Obviously both strategies need to be approached, but if you successfully target #1, you're still going to have gun deaths in this area - maybe less, but still. If you successfully target #2, you'll have none - not only no gun deaths, but also deaths by other methods.
I don't know what more could have been done to help this young man and prevent this happening - I don't know any details about his treatment etc. But any time that a person sets out to kill dozens of young children and they were identified and being treated, we have to define that as a failure of the mental health system, even if fixing that failure might be really hard. Safety of the patient and safety of others in their family and community has got to be a top priority of that system.
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Also worth noting each state in the US has different laws. So it’s easy to have really different gun laws. That allows some states to “trial” more rigorous gun laws and demonstrate that the end of the world didn’t immediately occur.
I understand these weapons were purchased in NJ and used in CN, both of which have relatively strict gun laws relative to some other states.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_United_States_(by_state)
Here's homicides per capita by state in 2004:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state
Someone must have graphed and drawn conclusions between those two datasets.
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Guns make it incredibly easy to kill, so what might have been an act of violence becomes an act of murder.
Yes. Stricter gun controls probably still would have let his mother have guns, but probably not those guns, and now with that sort of ammunition capacity. The incident might still have happened, but there'd likely be a lot less bodies.
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America's Teachers: Heroes or Greedy Moochers at the Public Trough? - Nation of Change:
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Newtown school board, like school boards all over this country, was considering cutting the school’s elementary music program and library program. It should be noted that both the school librarian and the school music teacher, whose jobs were on the line at the school board, stayed with the kids they were teaching when the attack began.
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But why? If you haven’t got access to a gun, then however much you might be inclined to an armed rampage, you’re not going to be able to actually do it.
An acquaintance has been quoting literature on facebook in support of his argument that gun control wouldn’t help America with its violence problem. I haven’t followed the links to know of what quality they are. I will concede that this latest incident is probably as much a failure of mental health systems as gun control systems. Reports that the mother was stockpiling weapons because she was worried about people coming to get her wealth because of the Global Financial Crisis and the impending meltdown of society – I do despair.
Certainly most American gun crime isn’t these sort of high profile shootings, it’s domestic violence, drug crime, armed robberies, gang warfare etc etc. Only some of that is going to be significantly impacted by gun control laws.
Completely off topic, I’d encourage everyone to watch Finding Mercy TV1 tonight at 9.30. Story of an old friend and her trip back to Zimbabwe to find her childhood friend who has disappeared under the regime.