The Son Also Rises.

[Seth]

Seth

Your view on gun research is revealing. You are assuming before the research is done that it will show guns to be bad. I suspect that you know, deep down, that guns are a net detriment to society, and that is why you oppose people actually doing the research to find out.

I'm assuming the results will show that people get killed with guns. We don't need to spend any money on that. The question is, and has always been twofold: Who is doing the shooting and why, and are those shootings justification for violating the constitutional rights of people who aren't doing the shooting?

On the NRA.

They are wealthy, not because of the membership of a minority of the USA, but because they are fed tens of millions of dollars by the gun manufacturers. Such bribes make organisations corrupt.

You have some evidence of this "tens of millions of dollars" I suppose? I'd like to see it, not that it matters.

Of course gun manufacturers and other gun sport businesses are going to contribute to the NRA. The NRA is the most effective lobbying organization on gun rights matters that exists anywhere on the planet, and since both manufacturing guns and gun-related items are fully lawful and constitutionally protected commercial activities, it is in the best interests of the business community to support the organization that speaks for them before their elected representatives. It's not "bribery" and it's not "corrupt" for an organization whose purpose is to lobby on behalf of gun rights and shooting sports to take money from it's members or it's commercial supporters, any more than it's corrupt for the Sierra Club or the Wild Earth Guardians to take money from their supporters and the "green" industry.

The Supreme Court recently affirmed with finality that money equals speech, particularly when it comes to political speech. Corporations and businesses have the same constitutional right to engage in political speech in their commercial interests as an individual does, and therefore they have the right to contribute to political lobbying organizations or trade groups that support their industry interests before Congress.

You, being a Marxist, clearly don't like that fact, but a fact it remains, which makes your deliberate and mendacious mischaracterization of the NRA nothing more than sour grapes and whining from someone who just wants to have his way regardless of the impact on the rights of others.

[Seth]

...there is no doubt that the term "bribe" is pejorative...

"You can have ice cream for dessert tonight if you don't fight with your sister this afternoon." Here the bribe is not pejorative. It consists of the promise of a reward, and thoroughly positive and constructive - a standard part of operant conditioning taking place millions of times a day in ordinary life.

Still, you too seem to be missing my point, which is restricted to saying that Seth's assertion that part of the definition of bribe is that it is an illegal act. I made no mention beyond that until I said that we all think of bribes as either good or bad, depending on what we think about the cause or motivation they are made for.

Again, pettifoggery. While we both agree you are technically correct with the textbook definition of "bribe" that has little to do with how you used the word in the context of the comment you made, which was clearly in the pejorative context.

[Seth]

...we all know that's not what Hermit meant or said.

What I did say - and mean - is that a bribe does not need to be some illegal act to be a bribe, and that you are wrong for claiming the contrary.

Which has nothing to do with the statement you made originally from which this incident of your dishonest and petty niggling has emerged.

[Seth]

...there is no doubt that the term "bribe" is pejorative...

"You can have ice cream for dessert tonight if you don't fight with your sister this afternoon." Here the bribe is not pejorative. It consists of the promise of a reward, and thoroughly positive and constructive - a standard part of operant conditioning taking place millions of times a day in ordinary life.

Still, you too seem to be missing my point, which is restricted to saying that Seth's assertion that part of the definition of bribe is that it is an illegal act. I made no mention beyond that until I said that we all think of bribes as either good or bad, depending on what we think about the cause or motivation they are made for.

No, Hermit. It may be very mildly pejorative, but it still represents a motivator to human behaviour which is considered to be at least somewhat reprehensible. If individuals/children have to be "bribed" to do a certain action, the consensus would be that it is problematic in the long run...

The key to the essentially pejorative connotation of the word is that the process of giving something to someone to induce them to act is done as a way of inducing good or bad behavior not by appealing to the individual's sense of justice or right conduct, but rather by appealing to their base personal pleasure motives as a way of modifying behavior. Most people would agree that to "bribe" someone carries with it a taint of immoral or unethical behavior on the part of one or both parties. If you have to "bribe" your children by offering them cake if they will behave, you are engaging in questionably ethical and moral behavior because you are not solving the root problem of misbehavior, you are attempting to get immediate results in the short term at the possible expense of future behavior problems reinforced by not properly enforcing discipline for the sake of teaching the child that misbehavior is unacceptable. Instead, you teach the child that misbehavior is exactly the opposite; it is the key to receiving unjust and unearned rewards. Behave badly long enough and loud enough and Mommy will give you cake.

The same applies to the connotation of "bribe" in the larger social context. It's inherently pejorative because as it applies to a person's official political or governmental duties because the bribe is offered as a reward directly to the official for taking some action that the official would not otherwise be inclined or required to take. It's an ethical violation on the part of the official to accept a bribe because it profits him personally while abusing the power and authority of his office and the public trust.

So, I still say that the word "bribe" is inherently pejorative regardless of its usage. In your case, it's absolutely and demonstrably used pejoratively in your original post.

All the rest is a somewhat interesting discussion of semantics that has absolutely nothing whatever to do with what you actually wrote and what you meant by it.

[Seth]

You should post more Hermit. You are one of the few people who post intellectual and interesting comments on the forum now.

(By the way, this is absolutely not a comment on anything Jim has said in this debate. I'm barely following along. Whether Hermit's comment is right or wrong in the context of this debate isn't my point. His comment above is interesting and intelligent on it's own).

Pity yours aren't.

[Blind groper]

Seth

The contributions of the gun makers to the NRA is a matter of public record. And it made a big difference to the NRA. The history of that organisation (available on the internet) shows that its focus, a few decades back, was on such things as gun safety. After the gun makers started giving it lots of money, it changed, and became a lobby group for the freedom to sell guns to anyone, anywhere. This is the opposite of gun safety, and it is pretty clear that the NRA has been corrupted.

By your own standards, the NRA has been bribed, and not in a good way.

[Seth]

Seth

The contributions of the gun makers to the NRA is a matter of public record.

Kindly cite which public record it's part of. Specifically.

And it made a big difference to the NRA.

Damned right it did, and a good thing too.

The history of that organisation (available on the internet) shows that its focus, a few decades back, was on such things as gun safety.

It still is. It's the largest and most effective gun safety education operation on the planet and it's been doing an excellent job for a hundred years.

After the gun makers started giving it lots of money, it changed, and became a lobby group for the freedom to sell guns to anyone, anywhere.

This is a lie. Remove the last three words and you are correct. So what? Owning guns is a constitutional right in the US, and therefore it's perfectly lawful to manufacture and sell them and for manufacturers to join and fund a trade organization that supports their industry.

Add the last three words and it's a blatant falsehood that demonstrates your ideological bias and lack of intellectual integrity because the NRA has never advocated or even suggested advocating a freedom to sell guns "to anyone, anywhere." That's simply a lie you manufactured and cannot substantiate.

This is the opposite of gun safety, and it is pretty clear that the NRA has been corrupted.

The NRA has more than one mission. It has several. Among them are gun safety education (the number one educator in gun safety on the planet), marksmanship training (again, the number one marksmanship organization on the planet), police marksmanship training (same), political lobbying on gun issues, and gun rights protection and preservation, all of which missions have been formulated and approved by the general membership of the NRA at its regularly held national convention and business meeting in a perfectly ordinary democratic process of electing officers and voting on proposals. If you'd ever been to an NRA convention you'd know this, but you haven't, so your ignorance is showing.

The NRA does what its members want it to do, and right now defending our gun rights is of extreme importance because fuckwits on the left are constantly attacking and infringing on our rights. It's our organization and it does what we want it to do, so fuck off, you're not a member.

By your own standards, the NRA has been bribed, and not in a good way.

No, the NRA is doing exactly what I paid the NRA more than 10,000 dollars to do: protect my gun rights against people like you. If it didn't do so, THAT would be corruption.

[Blind groper]

You paid the NRA more than $10,000????

Bloody hell!
I know I am not permitted to accuse other people on this forum of being stupid, but I am soooo tempted.

[Seth]

You paid the NRA more than $10,000????

That's right. I bought life memberships for my sister and her husband and her (then) five kids and I upgraded my membership to Endowment status.

Bloody hell!
I know I am not permitted to accuse other people on this forum of being stupid, but I am soooo tempted.

It's not stupid, it's smart. I support the NRA because the NRA works tirelessly to protect my gun rights.

[JimC]

Memo at NRA headquarters when Seth's cheque arrived...

Break out the French champagne, boys!

[trdsf]

I wonder if the report looked at the intangibles that come with being part of the economic elite -- better health care and better schools and being able to afford college move you a lot further up the board than someone who doesn't have those advantages, even if the children don't inherit directly.

Fundamentally, even if they don't directly cash in on inheritance, they have the advantage of being moved to the head of the line as an unearned benefit.

The rich are different. But what parent in his right mind is going to willingly short his kid anything as valuable as education and social networking? So it's not really a conspiracy that "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."

My point is: Whaddayagonnadoo? Have some sort of Lottery where a certain percentage of the 1% has to go play the Hunger Games? Most of the Old Money, it's no more their fault that they're rich than the poor kid who's poor. If you're going to question one or the other's birthrights, then you have to question them all, no? Where are you going to stand to do that, exactly?

Simple. I don't know. I haven't thought of anything that could conceivably work outside of confiscatory estate taxes, but that's punishing the rich rather than elevating the poor and thus not a solution.

Taking education seriously would be a huge step forward -- and that does *not* mean memorization in order to get through a test.

Ultimately, it's going to take a societal change where greed isn't held to be a corporate or personal virtue, and where corporations -- especially if the Supreme Court wants to give them the rights of a person -- take the civic and civil responsibilities that some of them used to. My home town could very easily have been a factory town. In many ways it was: the factory built a lot of the housing in town, much of which is still standing. However, rather than lock in their employees to try to take back in what was paid out in wages, homes were sold outright or rented at genuine market rates (and were ultimately spun off to being outside company ownership). I don't think you'd find a company that would do that anymore. Donations to local organizations are only done to ensure getting the company name all over everything possible, if they're done at all. The municipal, county and/or state governments are only there to extort tax breaks from on threat of closing down facilities, not to be worked with to ensure local services.

And how you bring that about, I don't know. The only things that comes to mind are:

- Higher taxes on executive pay above some multiple of the lowest full-time pay rate in that company, to start addressing income imbalance. There's no question that executive pay, certainly at the largest companies, is out of control -- frankly, no one is worth $20 million a year (or more), I don't care who they are or what they do. It's become a competition between the CEOs now, to see who can get more, regardless of their company's performance.
- Crack down on companies that move their headquarters overseas in order to dodge their fair share of taxes.
- End corporate welfare, and
- End the practice of communities racing to the bottom, bidding against each other, offering larger and larger incentives to coax companies to relocate at the expense of city services.

I think a lot of the problems in corporate America are due to the rise of the MBA and the theory that a manager doesn't need to know anything about the business they're in, they just need to know how to manage. The last thirty years have told us quite clearly otherwise -- there is a whole class of middle- and upper management who don't give a shit about their company, only about how they can get more out of it and leverage it into either a promotion or a higher paying position somewhere else without actually doing anything productive. In my own experience, MBAs are only interested in self-promotion and everyone else in the company is at best a number in a spreadsheet.

[Svartalf]

Break out the French champagne, boys!

Is there any other kind?

[JimC]

Break out the French champagne, boys!

Is there any other kind?

Fair point...

[Seth]

I wonder if the report looked at the intangibles that come with being part of the economic elite -- better health care and better schools and being able to afford college move you a lot further up the board than someone who doesn't have those advantages, even if the children don't inherit directly.

Fundamentally, even if they don't directly cash in on inheritance, they have the advantage of being moved to the head of the line as an unearned benefit.

The rich are different. But what parent in his right mind is going to willingly short his kid anything as valuable as education and social networking? So it's not really a conspiracy that "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."

My point is: Whaddayagonnadoo? Have some sort of Lottery where a certain percentage of the 1% has to go play the Hunger Games? Most of the Old Money, it's no more their fault that they're rich than the poor kid who's poor. If you're going to question one or the other's birthrights, then you have to question them all, no? Where are you going to stand to do that, exactly?

Simple. I don't know. I haven't thought of anything that could conceivably work outside of confiscatory estate taxes, but that's punishing the rich rather than elevating the poor and thus not a solution.

Taking education seriously would be a huge step forward -- and that does *not* mean memorization in order to get through a test.

Ultimately, it's going to take a societal change where greed isn't held to be a corporate or personal virtue, and where corporations -- especially if the Supreme Court wants to give them the rights of a person -- take the civic and civil responsibilities that some of them used to. My home town could very easily have been a factory town. In many ways it was: the factory built a lot of the housing in town, much of which is still standing. However, rather than lock in their employees to try to take back in what was paid out in wages, homes were sold outright or rented at genuine market rates (and were ultimately spun off to being outside company ownership). I don't think you'd find a company that would do that anymore. Donations to local organizations are only done to ensure getting the company name all over everything possible, if they're done at all. The municipal, county and/or state governments are only there to extort tax breaks from on threat of closing down facilities, not to be worked with to ensure local services.

And how you bring that about, I don't know. The only things that comes to mind are:

- Higher taxes on executive pay above some multiple of the lowest full-time pay rate in that company, to start addressing income imbalance. There's no question that executive pay, certainly at the largest companies, is out of control -- frankly, no one is worth $20 million a year (or more), I don't care who they are or what they do. It's become a competition between the CEOs now, to see who can get more, regardless of their company's performance.
- Crack down on companies that move their headquarters overseas in order to dodge their fair share of taxes.
- End corporate welfare, and
- End the practice of communities racing to the bottom, bidding against each other, offering larger and larger incentives to coax companies to relocate at the expense of city services.

I think a lot of the problems in corporate America are due to the rise of the MBA and the theory that a manager doesn't need to know anything about the business they're in, they just need to know how to manage. The last thirty years have told us quite clearly otherwise -- there is a whole class of middle- and upper management who don't give a shit about their company, only about how they can get more out of it and leverage it into either a promotion or a higher paying position somewhere else without actually doing anything productive. In my own experience, MBAs are only interested in self-promotion and everyone else in the company is at best a number in a spreadsheet.

Maybe it's just time to accept the fact that life ain't fair, never has been, and never will be. It doesn't matter what you try to do society will always stratify and some people will be successful and others won't. The best that can ever be done is to make sure that the society is peaceful and the economy is kept perking along because a rising tide raises all boats. The standard of living of America's poor is miles above that of poor people in Africa because, and only because our economy improved life for everyone without punishing people who have committed no misdeeds that caused the economic and social inequity. It's easy to blame "the wealthy" for the plight of "the poor," but it's a fallacy because you cannot point to any particular thing that any particular wealthy person did to any particular poor person that justifies punishing the wealth person. And when you can, you find that what they did is already against the law, which makes punishing them very easy.

Unlike the kings of England and France or the Marxist elite of the USSR or Red China, free market economies like the US, and much of the rest of the first world, do not use the law to specifically oppress any person or group. There is no aristocracy and no monarchy that enforces rules and laws to keep the peons "in their place." In medieval Britain, serfs were serfs by law and could not ever rise to the aristocracy or even the nobility no matter how capable they were. Like India, where the caste system still has "untouchables" who are actively denied any ability to advance themselves, Britain and other monarchical nations of the past have a long history of deliberate oppression akin to the slavery that plagued the early years of our Republic.

But like Britain, we repudiated slavery and made it a crime to hold someone in bondage, even voluntary bonded servitude.

What this means is that anyone who has it within them to be successful is not blocked from seeking that success. There is no guarantee that they will achieve such success, nor should there be, but the government cannot say to a black man from the Bronx "You are a black man from the Bronx and it is illegal for you to work on Wall Street. You are restricted to the Bronx and can only hold a minimum wage job." That is injustice. But is is not unjust to say to the same man "If you can make something of yourself there are no legal impediments in your way. You have an equal right to strive for success in your life, or to suffer failure in your life. You are the same as anyone else in your equal opportunity to succeed or fail on your own merits and government will not interfere in your quest for success. Your competitors may try to do so, but that's all part of achieving success and not a matter that government has any authority to control, either by favoring your advancement by disfavoring your competitor's advantage or vice versa. You are free and have an equal right to try and to achieve success if you have it within you to do so, and government will protect your equal right to that opportunity, but only that opportunity."

That's what "equal opportunity" means. It does not mean "equality of outcomes" or "equality of starting position"

[Blind groper]

The truth is that modern society is streets ahead of anything in the past, and in western nations, even the 'poor' have a way of life that would not have been dreamed of in centuries gone by.

However, though we can take comfort in what has been achieved, we should never be complacent. We should be constantly trying to help make a better world. This includes other countries also. I recently sent a donation of $200 to the Nepal earthquake relief fund. Seth sent $10,000 to the NRA. Which do you guys think was the best transaction?