Maybe they should get the top scoring poster on the physics stack exchange to do an AMA, instead of a television celebrity (while noting asking questions of celebries is in fact Reddit AMA is for).

But then why read Reddit at all, then. Also Reid what did Bill Nye do to you?

One of the reasons Americans are usually pro-gun is because most Americans have a deep-seated distrust of our government. Perhaps it's because of how our nation was founded, or because we're taught that from youth we can't trust anyone, but most of us don't trust the government. It's a regular occurrence in movies and television shows for our own government to be the bad guy. I'm not sure that occurs in programs or movies produced in other states. Not that having an AR-15 is going to be very effective against u.s. military technology, but that's the prevailing attitude about our government.

Edit: we all know what the US government has done to natives, blacks, and homosexuals in the past, so it's no wonder we don't trust them.

Only between 22-29% of Americans own firearms. Most only have one or two firearms, but 14% of US firearm owners have more than 8. 3% of the US population accounts for 50% of the firearms in circulation (N.B. this 3% also includes every noteworthy mass shooter to date). If there's one thing I learned living in the US, it's that, yeah, Americans universally hate and distrust their government. However, gun ownership clearly doesn't follow the same distribution.

That clearly isn't the only explanation, then. Is it access to firearms? No; Canadians have relatively similar access to firearms as the US - the largest difference is that we require a written test before you can buy a pistol - but there is far less demand. Is it cultural? Americans aggrandize violence - particularly gun violence - much more than any other culture on Earth. They think guns are cool. They think shooting bad guys is cooler. Many of them think bad stuff is going to happen, and owning a gun and being willing to use it is the first step to surviving that badness. The US is also a deeply divided country with much unresolved resentment, as you hinted.

There's a lot more going on here. The truth is that nobody knows exactly why the US has such a bad gun violence problem. The only strong correlation that anybody has found is simply the quantity of guns, which you have to admit is astoundingly high in the US - and which is, again, concentrated in the hands of an extreme minority. However, it's an open question of whether the quantity of guns by itself makes it more likely that people will use them, or if demand for guns correlates with something else that's even more problematic.

Honestly, how far back to you have to go in time for this kind of thinking to start to make sense?

You could stop at 1861, which actually clarifies a lot.

I wouldn't call it an "extreme" minority. 1/3 of Americans own a firearm, and that's over 100 million people. I don't disagree with anything else in particular. Most folks, even gun folks, are in favor of background checks and increased penalties for crimes committed using a firearm, which, incidentally, CA democrats recently abolished (edit: SB620, not 650)

I wonder if that has anything to do with our own governor owning several guns.

1/4.

But that wasn't the extreme minority I'm talking about. I'm talking about the 3% of the US population that owns 50% of all guns in the US. There's a power law distribution at work here, and it's being fueled by some kind of crazy.

It's not so hard to imagine that we're such an outlier. We have all the right historical factors: a history of westward expansion by force of arms, large open territories in which property owners need to enforce property rights themselves, and all the religious fervor to be found in small towns funneled into a singular desire for autonomy enforced out of the barrel of a gun, and codified into shared mythology through the Second Amendment.

Does Canada have half of those things?

To top it off, we have Hollywood films (also American) glorifying this exact kind of thing (for decades, westerns were the most durable genre), and gun makers all too happy to sell sell sell

I've never owned a gun, but I've shot them plenty of times. It was just something we did in scouts, and it seemed totally normal to me. For one particular outing, one single dad provided guns for the entire troop.

Oh, and this dad? He wasn't a country hick, but one of the designers of an early PA-RISC processor.

yes

yes

yes

yes

definitely not.

Canada also has a suppressed minority and a militarized police force. Plus basically all of our media comes from the US (or was created for US audiences, like Stargate SG-1). But we also have single payer healthcare and a richer, more educated public. Who knows?

Major differences I would presume:

• smaller population
• different legal system / implementation of federalism
• maybe... far enough away from some hypothetical crazy town somewhere in the US, that was the epicenter from which the seeds of gun fever initially emminated. The national border served as a boundary condition so said insanity reflected rather than refracted.

Also, according to Michael Moore, the reason has something to do with Canadians not locking their doors. Lol

Wait a minute.

I found it: the American Revolution.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canada

Got to “We Could Have Been Canada” and closed the tab.

No, that’s not it. Most Canadians are not, in fact, Canadian: in addition to a healthy influx of immigrants from around the world, the single largest origin of immigrants is the United States, continuously and also in large waves. At one point mid-century, immigrants from the United States made up more than a third of the population of the western provinces. That is simply too many people to have had no effect on Canadian culture.

Also, no, you couldn’t have been Canada. Canadian confederation happened in large part because Britain and the United States were prepared to swap Canada for reparations after the Civil War, an appealing prospect for both sides since Manifest Destiny was a popular idea back then, and the British were eager to be rid of the expensive northern colonies. I don’t entirely remember how the debate went, but the Canadian delegation convinced them not to do it, and that Canadians would have to consent either way, paving the path to Canadian independence.

Without an independent United States, Canada never would have had the opportunity to become independent when it did. Maybe not even today.

So what? Canadians all live within a few miles of the US border. Excluding vast amounts of uninhabitable wasteland, the population distributions of Canada and the United States are very similar.

Both descend from English common law. There are two main differences: Canada has a single integrated judiciary, while the United States has separate state and federal court systems. The other main difference is that Canadian judges are always appointed, and are never elected.

I'm not sure these differences explain anything.

Very different. Among other things, our government is designed so US-style gridlock automatically triggers an election. That might explain why e.g. Rand Paul is nursing broken ribs today, but doesn't seem to explain much else.

maybe.

You'll be interested to learn that we absolutely do lock our doors.

FWIW, the article is less about what it could have meant to be "Canadian" culturally (whatever that would mean), and more about how our political climate might differ in a world without the all the mythological baggage handed down to us by the revolution. One of the ideas is that if the radical Whigs had come to power in Great Britain, there could have been a bloodless transition to enlightenment ideals in America.



This is interesting to me, because frankly, a lot of our problems seem to stem from the ridiculous ideology that conservatives attach to the revolutionary founding of our country.

IOW: "The revolution made me do it" <-- semi-valid excuse for a big chunk of our political dysfunction?

Isn't that sort of the basis of "originalism"?

"We can't do this good thing because I invented an interpretation of the constitution that prohibits it."

But I guess this kind of speculation about alternative histories pretty much means anything could have happened, and starts to feel like the lamer variety of never-ending internet discussion. ("What if Germany had won world war 2?" etc.)

1000% this.

They do AMAs all the time with real scientists, people don't read them.

Actually my sister sent me that, lol. And I dislike Bill Nye because "science popularization" is a dubious goal that seems to lead more to a useless fetishization and Dunning-Kruger edgelords than real understanding.

IDK, a bunch of Afghanis with AK47s seem to be holding out against the military pretty well.

^ Joke's wrong on a few levels but hey

Yeah, which is a pretty big problem. Many people think of "the deep state" as a secret underground NSA base, when IIRC most tasks are contracted out to private companies.

Something I'd really like to know about conservatives: did you guys hate the government this much before the confederacy? I suppose there was always a conflict between the North and the South. But it seems to me that the anti-government sentiment that is bandied about as if it were something inherent in our history, but that just seems to me to be something transplanted from the confederacy and grafted onto modern conservatvism. Liberals are American too, and last I checked they didn't hate and distrust their government.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos was pretty good.

Some of them do. There's the Glenn Greenwald-Noam Chomsky-style leftists who emphasize personal liberties/rights and renounce American "imperialism" and the US government's close ties with big business. I think it's fair to say that they "hate" and "distrust" the government. But I suppose that, while they hate what the government does and, seemingly, (almost categorically) everything the government does is problematic (from their perspective), they don't believe in principle that government can't be good. They just don't think that it can be as long as it doesn't serve the interests of the general population, but the interests of a small, privileged/elite ruling class.

ITT: Reverend Jones blames all his country's problems on its past wars.

There might be something to it, though. Perhaps what's really toxic is violent secession, of which both the revolutionary war and the civil war are examples. In the former, the victor came away from the episode with headstrong patriotic ideology. In the latter, the secessionists lost, so the lasting effects have been more negative, and downright bitterly divisive.

What's weird is that modern conservativism seems to be a potent mixture of the demagoguery resulting from both wars: the purity of the constitution is appealed to, but through guerilla tactics of disloyal obstruction.

That's true, some of them weren't bad guys. For instance, I love the videos of Feynman explaining physics I'll never have the time to study. Bill Nye is still a ****.

Also, even though trying to talk about transgender issues on his show was a good idea, the tackiness was repellent. Adorkable works for high school movies, not for anything else really.

I wouldn't say I'm a particular fan of Glenn Greenwald but I'm a huge fan of Chomsky, and I don't think it'd be fair to me to say I "hate" the government. Though the type of person you're talking about does exist and they're annoying, so, I guess carry on.

True.



I suppose it's all a question of the scope of government. Conservatives bemoan programs that redistribute wealth or compete with the private sector, but the ultra-liberal folks you mentioned bemoan the use of government power as an instrument for private gain. Certainly one ought not apologize for government encroachment on individual liberty, and I'm not sure I count this as opposing government for the sake of opposing government Ron Swanson style.

OTOH, the conservative narrative that stopping people from by, say, opening a business without worrying about too many regulations, is somehow essential for human liberty, is such a stretch unless we accept the libertarian equation of freedom = autonomy.

FYI: the "deep state" refers to the permanent government bureaucracies made up of unelected officials that persist from one administration to the next, regardless of the party of the president. It doesn't necessarily relate to espionage, intelligence services or even the military, even though it doesn't include some of those things.

Or so said Robert Phalen, who was recently appointed to the EPA Science Advisory Board.

Just curious: do you basically agree that most of the government's faults can ultimately be traced back, in one way or another, to the fact that our government isn't truly representative, and that it's primarily populated by a small political class who act primarily to advance their own interests and the interests of others who have special access to the halls of power?

I'm against air.

I think I read something about this very recently. Oh yeah, in the Bill Nye thread. They said Eisenhower's comments about the Military-Industrial Complex were more akin than the "deep state", which I think agrees with what you're saying.

In my mind, the "deep state" is an aspect of the MIC which deals in surveillance particularly, but I like your definition too.

Let's not forget that when conservatives oppose the "deep state", any definition is going to be a red herring. They're just bringing it up as a tactic to undermine the rule of law.

The deep state is the cabal of Russian superagents subverting democracy to get Hillary elected.

I think I am going to go back to being conservative because they seem like they are the only ones having any fun these days.

I need to buy a bunch more guns to get into Jons crazy club though. Do black powder count for your metric or are we going by official designations, because I've wanted to build myself one of those for a while. Shooting those is so zen. Super dangerous though if you get too zen. I think there's so many guns because of something in the water., and I am thinking I am going to go with the deep state is something evil and satanic or something.

I had to tell a girl I'm seeing that I own guns recently and oh boy that is an unpopular thing to tell people in cities.

That's my post of the month, carry on