Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
Yep, no problem, though it's so straightforward to me that I'm surprised you don't see it.
I didn't have a problem seeing it, I just hoped it meant one of the less likely interpretations; sadly, it didn't.
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Ownership of a gun doesn't confer "freedom" any more than does ownership of an angle grinder or a hand grenade.
It doesn't confer freedom, agreed.
I'm discussing the freedom to own a gun, not any freedom deriving from owning a gun (which I agree is spin).
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That's my idea of freedom, and the UK government has never tried to restrict it.
The Norwegian government has.
It's part of my feeling of freedom, too, so you can imagine I'm not very happy about that.
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But this means sod all to me, because *guns* mean sod all to me.
Which is a dangerous attitude. It is precisely those things that matter to others than ourselves we must guard most preciously; if a free society has any meaning, that's its essence, guarding the freedom of our fellow man. Same principle as freedom of speech: it's not what I want to hear I need to protect, it's what I don't want to hear I need to protect. The strongest and/or most numerous, as a rule, have the least need of our solidarity.
It's also apropos that whole bit about reactance and its implications for the sense of freedom and differences in sensibilities on this point.
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The thing that is somehow integral to one's sense of freedom is culturally dependent.
Individual, actually, more than cultural.
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Only on a mainly-American forum would anybody - as some idiot did, here - talk about the 'slave mentality' of those who'd consent to a gun control policy.
I was one of those two idiots, and it wasn't about who would consent to a gun control policy.
I already do consent to a fairly strict gun control policy, and though I would like to see it adjusted slightly, I'm fairly happy to leave it about the way it is. My main problem with it has been that I'm not allowed to exceed the level of safety that is mandatory by storing the bolts in a seperate household, which I would prefer to do, having already lost one friend to her father's brain tumor induced psychotic break and knowing that it's hard to predict such things (a gun is a hobby for me, not a means to freedom, or a symbol thereof).
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That, I have to say, was possibly the silliest piece of American-ideological horseshit I've ever seen on these forums - which is saying quite something, considering the stiff opposition presented by other species of American bollocks I've seen presented on these forums over the years here.
A bit eurocentric today, are we? 
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I do hope Ibsen wasn't too smug and farty to fail to realise that his own words applied to him, himself? I mean, he's known outside of Norway as a bit of ponderous old windbag (no offence, but, you know, let's face it) - but if he was conscious of that, he was OK by my lights. 
He seems to have been conscious of that. Amusingly, he's a bit of a national treasure in our culture, but we're never introduced to any of his main work (political and social), only to the plays he wrote. No wonder, since he warns against precisely the kind of culture we have turned into, warns against the kind of state we have developed, and so on and so forth. His message was to not become what we have become, and yet we shove that under the rug and hold him up as an icon, divorced from everything he stood for.
Got to love an educational system that, by law, must impart a specific set of values laid down by the 68'ers.
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Me, I get a sense of freedom not just by having a tent, but also by, for instance, being fit enough to climb a mountain and put it up there.
Yeah, I get that. I would say I feel freer when I travel, too. But, as Ibsen and Brandes both put it, freedom is an aspiration, a drive, a sort of pressure, an ambition; closely related are reactance and will to power, in my opinion. It's an internal thing, primarily, and secondarily an external thing (the result of pursuing that ambition; liberty, if you will).
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BTW, for the record: I *do* like democracy. Don't argue with me on that, Aswad. You'd lose. 
Sounds like we have a date with a mug of dry cider and the drink of your choice; and a long date it is.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Gun Control and mass murder, one does not eliminate... - 
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