re: #563 Charles

Another sleeper shows up to defend these raving kooks.

There’s probably a lot of us among your older membership, Charles. I do think they have the right to say what they say, as stupid and easily disproven as it is, and the right to carry guns while they say it. I don’t feel we should set a precedent where people need to be disarmed before they dissent, because like so many of the social precedents that media personalities set, it’s going to come back and bite us on the ass when the argument eventually turns to “do the Israelis have the right to be armed or not?” and people start passing around videos of heavily armed ultra-Orthodox Israelis.

The fact is, there is no idea - democracy, communism, even the General Theory of Relativity - that cannot be casually dismissed as “stupid and ignorant” by people who don’t want to believe in them. Of those three, only Relativity can actually be tested by experiments that would fail if it was false, which is why it’s as close to fact as anything can be. For everything that falls outside the realm of science, decisions are made based on popular opinion as measured either through voting or through the last side standing after a civil war, and “exercising your right to freedom of expression” is the only peaceful way to reach an agreement on things we feel, but can never actually scientifically prove, are right or wrong.

Being worried about people who seem “prepared to do violence” is more a sign that your side needs to do more to indicate that you’re ready to fight back, should the other side choose to abandon the ballot box and take up arms, than it is to insist your opponents should be disarmed in spite of laws that allow them to open carry. If the left really wanted peace, they would keep themselves as prepared for war as the right is.