One of the terms you might find useful here is "externalized costs". Manufacturing steel in a plant that emits tremendous amounts of pollution is cheaper because the pollution is "externalized" -- dumped in the environment for other people to clean up. Coal plants that have no emission controls "externalize" the the cost of CO2, mercury, sulphur compounds, and soot. The people down wind from the power plants will have to deal with acid rain, mercury poisoning, and bad air. They will bear the externalized costs.

Coal fired power plants without emission controls in the midwest and Ohio valley were externalizing their costs, and it was the mid-Atlantic and New England states that were picking up the external costs. Now, rate payers in the Midwest and Ohio valley are paying for emission controls, which are "internal" production costs.

Gut flora is an ecological system. Humans and agriculture are a part of many different ecological systems. Harming one part of ecological systems can harm other parts whose connection is not obvious.

Roundup (glyphosate) isn't known to harm monarch butterflies. I haven't read anything to that effect. But glyphosate kills many grasses and broad-leaf plants, one of which is the collection of milkweeds. Mono cropping and the widespread use of glyphosate has greatly reduced the number of milkweed plants that are found in and around fields.

Populations of Monarch butterflies have been greatly reduced because the one plant that their larvae feed on -- the milkweed -- have been largely killed off. Similarly, many different kinds of bees -- including the European honey bee -- need a variety of wild flowers to feed on. They can't survive just on orange blossoms. Again, glyphosate has eliminated many of the species that produce wild blossoms.

Glyphosate has more general effects than the Neonicotinoids, developed by Bayer, which kills off many insects (including bees, butterflies, and most other things that fly, creep, or crawl). Neonicotinoids are nerve poisons.

Most of our fruits and vegetables depend on pollinators. No pollinators, no fruits and vegetables. Unless you want to spend your days with a small brush moving pollen from blossom to blossom, doing the work that bees gladly do, don't spray nerve gas on your peach trees.

Perhaps it's wet with tears of joy after reading that thread about you. Nobody started a thread on the rest of us. What are we -- chopped liver?

visitors may be turned off by what they see — SophistiCat

This is a universal problem for zoos, national parks, books, web sites, grocery stores, schools, recycling bins, used furniture stores, museums, boutiques, war zones, nature-at-large, hog barns, churches, etc.

The perfect has quite often driven out the considerably better. Alas.

I can't remember how I got there (a link from somewhere in my regular reading) but there was an article in GQ about Ted Kennedy that went into his heavy drinking and womanizing -- interesting adjective that -- TK comes off pretty badly.

You might find it interesting -- but it's quite unpleasant.

Was Nixon a bad president? — andrewk

Nixon was not all bad. True enough, he did get the EPA going; he did establish diplomatic relations with China; he was in favor of treatment rather than imprisonment for drug offenses. His response to the Arab oil boycott was rational. So yes, he did have some good policy initiatives.

Nixon won the nickname "tricky Dick" in California politics years before he ran for President in 1968. The Watergate episode--the break-in through the cover-up, on to his impeachment and resignation, was pretty bad, however. So was his escalation of the war on Vietnam.

Whether Hubert Humphrey, Democratic challenger in '68, or George McGovern D. challenger in '72, would have succeeded in extricating the US from Vietnam is unknown, of course. My guess is that Humphrey would have been unsuccessful.

The history of the public support arm of the US government makes for inordinately depressing reading. Not only because - despite the recent rewriting of history - the upswell against it has only been a relatively recent 'invention' - dating specifically from around the time of Reagan - but because policy initiatives like the New Deal and the Great Society reforms were trending in the exact opposite direction! That is, there was nothing inevitable about the current US malaise — StreetlightX

Depressing, indeed.

There was strong opposition to social welfare legislation from the beginning. Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare--every single piece of legislation building a social safety net was opposed in Congress, and once passed, hindered--where possible--by local implementation.

There isn't much mystery about who opposed social welfare: conservative business interests, reactionaries, propertied elites, and so forth. Where these groups have the most power -- generally in the south and west, opposition and resistance is strongest.

Sometimes the reactionary elites have been proactive. Beginning in the 1930s, there was explicit policy in Federal housing and welfare programs to keep black and white people from living in the same neighborhoods, and to maximize the poverty of blacks. Of course this policy was challenged, but to little effect until the 1970s-1980s. By then the separation was pretty well cemented into place.

What was done to blacks is being done to the white working class as well, though slightly different means have been employed. Tax law, downward pressure on minimum wages, anti-union laws, trade law, etc. have combined to enrich the elite and impoverish the working class.

For the millions of the baby-boom who grew up in the years when the Great Society legislation was passed, and the economy was strong, all of this seems unreal and inconceivable. "It wasn't supposed to work out this way." No, it wasn't, but progressive politics was beaten in the 1980s, and it has not recovered.

Do you think, as many scholars do, that "development" has been a disaster? A disaster worth mentioning alongside things like the invasion of Iraq? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Of course it would depend on what we mean by "development". Here's two examples: Land-O-Lakes, headquartered in Minnesota, has a dairy promotion project in rural Uganda. They are encouraging milk production for export to places like Saudi Arabia. (It would be products like yogurt or cheese, not raw milk). Good? Bad?

I'm not sure that export dairy is what Ugandans need. I like the idea of very small dairy or meat operations (1 or 2 cows) where a family can raise it without too much difficulty. But a dairy herd is quite demanding, given the climate and so on.

I read an article about a disastrous development project by a large Swedish charity on Lake Turkana in Kenya to promote fishing. It was a total failure because the Swedes had evidently overlooked the fact that the people they were working with were cow herders and loathed fisherman. Nobody died, but it was a total waste of money and effort.

Another project in Uganda is promoting the growing of passion fruit as a local crop because it is high in vit. A and C, neither overly plentiful in the rural Ugandan diet. Another development project is training rural women to be health promotion workers--information providers, basically. These are sustainable and fit the local culture.

Development can end up being destructive and counterproductive. It depends on a lot of different things.

What went wrong? — Banno

The Marshall Plan spent $132 billion 2017 dollars between 1948 and 1952 to rebuild European economies after WWII. The United Kingdom received about 26% of the total, followed by France (18%) and West Germany (11%). The plan was both humanitarian and strategic.

Prior to WWII, France and the United Kingdom were the two leading colonial powers. The US was not an "also ran" prior to WWII, but the French and British umpires were still intact and functioning. After WWII, the France and the UK were no longer in a position to maintain hegemony over large parts of the world, especially the Middle East. US policy was clear after WWII: Control over Middle Eastern oil was a non-negotiable priority. It isn't that the US didn't have any oil -- we had a lot of it -- but we wanted to make sure that we had control over their customer base.

Oil and communism steered US policy for decades. I hasten to add that our competition and conflict with the Soviet Union was substantive, not merely symbolic or cultural--not that anti-communist policy was always well founded. The domino theory in Vietnam didn't hold water, but East/West competition and conflict was still quite real.

Euro-Japan-American capitalism required a clear defense around the world. We were in a position to provide it, and we did. The demise of the Soviet Union didn't solve all our problems. World-wide Capitalism still needed its champion and defender. Thus it was that we were targeted by conservative Arab/Islamist agents on 9/11. It might have made more sense for the US to attack and conquer Saudi Arabia than Iraq, but for various reasons that didn't seem like a good idea (apparently -- I wasn't included in the White House planning.)

Middle East management has become a debacle, but not because we were cruel and weak. Bad strategy was pursued, unworkable goals were embraced. It was a mess waiting to happen, and it happened very expensively.

Our conflict in the Middle East was not a culture war. It was in the defense of the world-capitalist-operation that we were there, to make sure vital energy supplies were not disrupted.

So, Australians may feel that with Donald Trump we have gone to hell in a hand basket. Don't be too critical, though. As far as I know, you all are part of the same Euro-Sino-Japan-American economic structure that the rest of us are part of, and there are no guarantees of anyone's continued prosperity. If the Economy of China contracts severely, we will all be up to our eye-balls in fresh worries.

(There is a lot of epiphenomenal cultural crap going around, and Australia is privileged to be as much a part of the crap circuit as we are.

He was let in because the body politic has been degraded to the point where large numbers of people can no longer tell shit from shoe polish.

This didn't just happen last year -- it's been a gradual process of degradation of public affairs, public discussion, national narratives, factual knowledge about the country, about the world. Many have fallen prey to the dislocations of globalization, and have been left without any way of understanding the world rationally. We are sitting ducks for all sorts of rubbish.

Had Hillary Clinton won, what I just said would still be true: Clinton would have made a better president than Donald Trump, but her win would not have disproved that the quality of public discourse was degraded. We would just have been lucky.

And Trump isn't the first. We need not go back to Warren G. Harding (1920) for examples of bad presidents. We have Richard Nixon (1968), Ronald Reagan (1980). and George Bush (2000). Trump may top them all, but he is not a first.

We were vexed to nightmare by a total slob, his hour come at last, who slouched into Washington with the Great Whore of Babylon.

Amish — praxis

There is much to like about the Amish, but their goal isn't to be independent of the economy. They buy and sell, but they want to keep their distance from technology beyond their baseline era. They consume modern medicine.

The world's agriculture in the 1920s and '30s was largely organic -- the massive application of pesticides and herbicides hadn't begun yet. We need to figure out a way to feed everyone without poisoning--or starving--everyone in the process.

We could certainly go back to far more sustainable past practices, but there is one very big problem in doing so: A sustainable economy would involve much less consumption, and largely unnecessary consumption drives the world's economy. Sustainability is a critical goal, so we must find a way to shrink unnecessary consumption without wrecking everything. Tricky.

The economies of the EU, China, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, and the US would be in trouble if consumption fell 10%, let alone 50%.

One element of the problem is that factories and farms have reached high levels of productivity. Supplying the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter no longer drives the economy. Now it is wants and wishes for the superfluous and unnecessary that drives the economy. The economy of mass consumption is quite wasteful and all the waste fuel, CO2, etc. is coming around to bite us in the ass.

Were there an epidemic of simple living -- a lifestyle involving much less consumption, much more re-use of items, a simpler lifestyle, etc., not only would major companies crash, but the practitioners of simple living would also crash -- unless they had actually become self-suffience and independent of the economy -- a condition that is about 99% phantasy.

Is this the only way we can live? Of course not, but the transition to an economy driven strictly by need (and not almost entirely by wishes) will probably not be voluntary. Look at the better post-apolyptic literature: Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart; James Howard Kunstler's World Made by hand series, including The Harrows of Spring; and A History of the Future.

A gentler transition to a simpler economy is difficult to imagine, because it requires such a wholesale shift of thinking and behaving, and it means the disestablishment of the power elite. Tricky, that one.

I agree. I am not informed about what the "best practices" to achieve the least harm to the individual and the collective society. "Least restrictive" is one principle that guides the care of elderly and disabled who need daily care. Sometimes this seems counter-intuitive. Is it better to have an elderly or disabled patient fall out of bed, or is it better that bed rails be employed? Personally, I think it would be better to employ bed rails.

Do pedophiles who have completed their prison terms need the restriction of a locked and fenced in hospital? Or is it better to have them living in a neighborhood group home where they can receive some supervision? I think the default should be group homes after prison. After all, we let murderers out of prison, we set them free. (and most of them don't re-offend)

We can certainly do better than locking people up forever to appease victims' families.

Is that fair though? — Jake Tarragon

It isn't fair, if psychopathy is a real disorder that prevents people from behaving normally, within the constraints of society. I think it is a real disorder (based on what I've read--I have no experience dealing with psychopaths, as far as I know).

Some behaviors--like pedophilia. homosexuality, and psychopathy which various societies have very strong reactions toward--happen to not be responsive to any therapeutic approaches. They are just deeply--structurally--ingrained features of the personality.

It isn't fair to imprison pedophiles for child abuse, have them complete the prison term, and then consign them to mental hospital confinement indefinitely. The same would go for homosexuality, were it to be re-criminalized here. There is no known method of rearranging someone's sexual orientation, object choice (in the case of pedophilia) and there is no known method of altering psychopathy.

So, I don't have a solution that get's us out of unfairness.

my original question lies in the nature of whether someone with a mental illness who ends up committing a crime is to be blamed. I don't think the will to resist committing crime is strong enough in some cases--due to the fact that the forces in such a person's brain move them to commit the crime. — kepler

The answer to your question is: "It depends". "Mental illness" is an exceedingly broad term. Someone who is moderately depressed and someone else who is in a psychotic episode are both mentally ill, and at vastly different levels of self-control. Most mentally ill people do not operate with the same level of impairment all the time. A person with bi-polar disorder may be mentally healthy for long periods of time, even though they still have the diagnosis, and then may slide into a period of psychotic, manic episodes where they are extremely impaired.

Persons who are at most moderately impaired (depression, anxiety, OCD, phobias, etc.) can be expected to care for themselves so that their moderate impairments do not result in criminal behavior. This includes self-monitoring, so that they don't allow their conditions to push them into criminal behavior. Many people--moderately mentally ill or not, have felt like physically attacking someone who was annoying them a lot. Most of the time they don't. They understand that it is their responsibility to deal appropriately with their feelings of anger/rage.

If they do not deal with their inappropriate behavior (like shoplifting, reckless driving, getting into fist fights, etc.) sooner or later they will be arrested and will then be forced to deal with it.

People who are more seriously mentally ill may may commit felonies (such as rape, murder). The innocent by reason of insanity laws are generally not much defense, in practice. Prosecutors, judges, and juries just don't like that defense.

Take psychopathic (or sociopathic) personality disorder. Psychopaths are thought to have neurological deficiencies which prevent them from acquiring the normal restraints on their behavior. The condition of psychopathy is ambiguous in that a little psychopathy can be a good thing--sort of. Some slightly psychopathic CEOs are probably better CEOs (from the company's perspective) because they are capable of executive decisions that more sensitive people would be reluctant to take -- like firing 3000 people to marginally increase profitability. A lot of psychopathy is a bad thing, though, and when psychopaths commit crimes they are likely to get zero sympathy because we hold them responsible for their acts, even if they couldn't hold themselves responsible. (Psychopaths literally don't feel guilt.)

In summary, there isn't a simple hard and fast rule for holding people with mental illness responsible. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

The US didn't used to be this crazy. — fishfry

It is this crazy quite often. Just different issues, different personalities, different tactics.

The transgenderism movement, which began with fairly modest goals, has achieved some real success, but I think it has gone off the deep end with "gender non-conforming" heading in all sorts of directions, including parents of some young children who are being assured that their 3 year old might need hormones.

People are free to revolt against whatever norms they don't like, but society is under no obligation to recognize their revolution as admirable, natural, or wholesome.

Here's an article suggesting that a contagious social hysteria is driving some of the transgender movement.

We need a movement of conversation and less victim-hood outrage so that the handful of issues which do afflict men can be looked at and addressed without violent opposition from confused college students and their terribly naive ideas. — VagabondSpectre

Totally. But I think there are more than a handful of issues which men need to talk about -- for their own good, the good of women, and society as a whole.

Why do I think about killing myself?

How to live through times of technological change (about which, btw, I can't suggest much)

The future of work, or what to do when the factories close and won't be opening again

Where do we, as men--men who are not academics, not professionals, not highly skilled--stand in society?

Men have emotions, needs, drives, desires; how should we give expression to these?

How do we participate in raising sons and daughters so that they will grow up as competent social persons?

Smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling: elevators to the sub-basement...

Still though, we do have some strange as hell cultural norms surrounding the penis. In some ways to have (to be) a penis is to be resistant to physical or emotional harm (and thereby be expected to endure it). Female genital circumcision is almost universally accepted as abhorrent and immoral (mutilation), but male genital circumcision isn't even seen as mutilation by the average person. — VagabondSpectre

It seems to me that female genital circumcision and related practices like disinfibulation of the vaginal opening, are worse than male circumcision. That said, I don't see any justification for circumcision--a practice which arose as a religious cult practice.

The popular image of men is been subjected to fairly intense pejoration -- sometimes for laughs (the stupid, clumsy male in sitcoms), sometimes as leverage (the portrayal of men as violent threats to women), or as targets -- the elite male at the top of the heap who oppresses women.

This is all aided and abetted by the assumption that men and women are radically different needs, and have radically different needs.

The issue with this is that most feminist schools of thought begin with the presumption that women are currently oppressed by men who hold all the power in society — VagabondSpectre

Whether we should blame third wave feminism, post modernism, identity politics, exhibitionists on talk shows, or something else, we seem to have lost important and useful terms. Yes, the personal is political -- but so much discussion seems to be nothing but personal. We need some larger categories.

Class is a larger category that doesn't get much mention, lately. Ordinary men have no more inherent power than ordinary women. Pair sex and wealth, and the power that wealth provides, and men and/or women have real power as part of a self-conscious class of people. More wealth, more power -- whether one is male or female.

Another trend that produces a lot of rubbishy discourse is the heavy focus on individual uniqueness. It isn't narcissism, it's the assumption that everyone is different and unique, except one's opponents who are all alike and are all stupid, to boot. We need the corrective of recognizing the ways in which we are all alike -- men like women, women like men, blacks like whites like asians, young like old, and so on.

Flannery O'Connor said of Ayn Rand, "I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."

O'Connor was a Catholic southern writer (religion was important to her) whose reputation is based primarily on her very dry humor and pithy short stories. Awarded the National Book Award for Fiction. She died in 1964.

I've read one or two of Rand's novels--didn't make a big impression. I'd say there were "OK", but not great.

I want to go where people know people are all the same. — Srap Tasmaner

A psychology prof said, "The Germans think everybody is the same, while the French think everybody is different. I think people are pretty much all alike.

If we compare people to dogs, we see that dog behavior is pretty much the same, from dog to dog, as are squirrels and bees. And people behavior is similarly pretty much the same. This is a good thing. It's what enables us to understand each other. If everybody really were unique (and some people think they are really unique) it would be much, much harder to conduct social lives.

Our essence then comes from our group, our genes, and our culture.

It is a gay thing. — Jeremiah

Oh, well... I'm familiar with THAT kind of manly essence... It's the philosophical essence I'm in the dark about.

My guess is that a lot of the guys who are shot, and maybe some of the women, and none of the children, were engaged in activities that increase the likelihood of one getting shot after a while. That would include drug dealing (it's a competitive business and shooting the competitor is routine and customary); gang membership; crime ring activities (see competition); and so on. According to one detective, a lot of police take a "one less rat to deal with" approach to many of these killings.

But the thing is, Ghettos & Slums, Inc. houses many people, not all of whom are engaged in crime. Not engaging in crime might be a crime by local norms. Also, your typical 'hood thug is not operating at a high level of sophistication. They often shoot first and ask questions later, shoot wildly, shoot vaguely identified people, don't really know what the fuck they are doing, and so on.

From the accounts I've read, a lot of the "innocent deaths" are due to the stupidity of the killers.

What do you mean, "innocent" or "nice"?

I didn't find clear statistics just now on "innocent victims". When in 1 year you have 3000+ injured by guns, and 600+ dead in Chicago, and where 75% of the murder cases are not "cleared" (solved), it is hard to say. 41 Chicago children under the age of 14 were killed last year. But there were also adult men and women who were killed in Chicago who are innocent of committing any crime whatsoever, and who's misfortune was to get in the way of a bullet.

Some people are involved in crimes, gangs, drug dealing, and so on, and happen to get shot as they walk down the street, say by rival gang members. Are they "innocent" and "nice"?

I know what lemon essence is, I don't know what an "essence of man" would be. Whatever it is, the existentialists say existence precedes essence". If existence, behavior, choosing, and so on precede "what we are" then it would seem like "essence" (whatever that is) would vary from person to person, and would be known to a greater or lesser degree by the individual.

"To Sartre, "existence precedes essence" means that a personality is not built over a previously designed model or a precise purpose, because it is the human being who chooses to engage in such enterprise. While not denying the constraining conditions of human existence, he answers to Spinoza who affirmed that man is determined by what surrounds him."

Thanks, as always, Wikipedia, for that.

So no, All Of Us don't have "a single essence". There is something essential about you, something essential about Tiff and Sapientia, and something essential about me -- but it isn't the same essence.

Congratulations on your anniversary.

lies in the realm of ethics, law, and the philosophy of the mind. Correct me if I'm wrong. — kepler

The moderators move misplaced topics into the correct category. It isn't terribly important what box you put your topic in, as all new and recently active threads show up in the same list, without respect to the box they are in.

It is has been observed that as many as 25% of the general prison population demonstrate psychopathic behavior. In a study by researchers at the Dept of Psychiatry at the U of Iowa, 320 newly incarcerated inmates were tested for Antisocial personality disorder. ASPD was present in 113 subjects, or about 35%. — kepler

Yes, this is a serious problem, but we don't have any effective therapy for psychopathy; I'm not aware how effective therapy for ASPD would be, if there is any.

Clearly, we are imprisoning people who could be more effectively (and cheaply) managed outside of prison -- like low level drug users and dealers. But some people need to be separated from society because they are just too antisocial.

There aren't any easy solutions, but one goal we should definitely work toward is the stabilization of society. People need a stable, reliable, economy and stable families in which to grow up. They benefit greatly from quality education experiences. That would, in the long run, end a lot of antisocial disruptive behavior resulting from growing up in chaotic, dysfunctional families.

I like Christina Rossetti's way of putting it:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Bleak midwinter cold kills off gypsy moths, deer ticks, and other vermin, and keeps the riff raff far to the south, where they can bask in endless heat, humidity, cockroaches, and mold.

And the armed Americans are going to let that happen? Maybe. — Sir2u

Is that the best that you can come up with? Disappointing. Perhaps you should think it through a bit more. — Sapientia

I couldn't say it better.

I like that you presume I'm a leftist and I have tactics. It's kind of like being in a movie or something. — Baden

You mean... stutter, stutter, you aren't? You don't? Oh, woe is us.

but I think it would be damned hard for the American military to take over if they wanted to. — Sir2u

Were I running the coup d'etat, I would recommend that the troops NOT fight it out with the citizenry on a block by block basis. There are much simpler ways of bringing the masses to their knees:

1. drastically reduce electric power; let local government allocate limited power to water supply, sewer pumps, hospitals (or cut it off altogether, if need be)
2. cut telephone/internet communication
3. ground airplanes (like on 9/15, only longer)
4. Sharply reduce ground transportation
5. Block radio signals

All of these actions can be taken without pointlessly killing a lot of people or destroying infrastructure, and can be eased off or leaned on, as needed. Conflict will probably arise around generation plants, major transmission switches, and wherever road and rail blocks are established -- generally, well outside of residential areas.

Power and telephone/internet cuts and sharply reduced ground transportation will produce real post-apocalyptic sensations which will reduce the entertainment value of revolting against the government to a minimum. Hot spots can be kept on ice longer, as needed.

Were the The Kardashians trashy when Deep Space 9 conceived Cardassians??

So, if I agree with you that the founding fathers wanted an armed citizenry, provided the citizenry wished to be armed, can you see the sense in placing a ceiling on the kind of arms that the citizenry can have?

It is not in the interest of the state or the citizens to have well armed and totally unregulated thugs running around armed with all sorts of guns and ammunition of varying lethality.

You objected to cannons; are cannons above the ceiling? What about armour piercing bullets -- spent uranium points, for instance? What about rockets (not ICBMs, of course -- I think there are zoning ordinances that rule out missile bases in people's back yards) like the kind that the Taliban and lots of other insurgents use? Are they over the top? If the citizenry need to defend themselves against the government, surface-to-air missiles would be handy for keeping the air free of government attackers.

Dune introduced the concept of family atomics. Maybe the Bush clan would want an atomic bomb at some point, or perhaps Trump's real estate operations would need to clear a slum quickly. A big bomb would save time and money.

A most helpful list of quotes. These strike me as more compelling, when one wants to defer to authority, than the Second Amendment.

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. — Noah Webster, 1787

Tiff probably has this tattooed on her arm.

It remains to be seen whether this is true today -- one hopes it will not be put to a test. If the hundred million (give or take a few million) Americans were to revolt and turn their guns on the military, I am not sure they would win.

It is an axiom of the left that it is best to not take on the military of the state, especially a well armed state, because state armies tend to be better at violence than unorganized citizens.

EDITED

Guns were needed for hunting and protection of livestock from wolves, foxes, etc. Guns were needed for the defense of or attacks on people -- but mostly as defense. Bow and arrows were also used for the same purpose. All that, granted. But what wasn't present -- as far as I can tell from reading American literature, is that the possession, use, and valorization of gun ownership as a topic of discourse is a very recent phenomena, as is the public discussion about gun control.

Can you cite a founding father (or founding mother) to the effect that every American should own a gun--outside of the 2nd amendment? Is there an old draft of the Declaration of Independence that starts out "now, in the course of human events, it has become necessary for every man to get himself a gun and periodically wave it around to make sure everyone knows he has one and to strenuously set forth arguments and reasons for a gun to rest in every hand..."?

... The reasoning typically given (other than the standard: "god told us to mutilate our genitals") is that it reduces the risk of contracting STDs (there was a circumcision fad in the 80's that promoted that idea). — VagabondSpectre

It would have been a fad if there wasn't actual evidence. As it happens, there is. I'll explain, but just to make it clear, I'm not arguing in favor of religious or routine infant circumcision.

For circumcised penises, the exposed glans and skin below the glans is dry, and slightly thicker. An intact foreskin helps populate the surface of the glans (and itself) with white blood cells which fight infection. As it happens, those white blood cells are the target of HIV. Removing the foreskin largely eliminates the white blood cells, and a slightly tougher surface is less likely to provide openings for the virus.

Mass adult circumcisions can be done using double-ring devices which fit around the penis on the inside of the foreskin, with a tight ring on the outside of the foreskin placed over the inner ring. The effect is to strangulate the foreskin, which tissue dies and falls off in about 7-10 days. It's not very painful and fairly safe. Yes, complications can occur. The advisability of using this technique depends on cost-benefit analysis. There is little risk and little suffering in the procedure, but great suffering and cost from developing AIDS. In many parts of the world, the chance of HIV infection and then developing AIDS is quite high.

This procedure would not be used primarily to prevent STDs, other than HIV.

Ordinary surgical circumcision is quite safe but requires much more skill and tends to be painful.

Threads aren't supposed to be merely long strings of PMs.

You passed over my serious post about the NRA to bite the joke bait.

The point I was making was that THIS discussion is but one of many that result from political engineering, using the NRA and the gun industry. Towards which ends "a gun in every hand" might be targeted would be a better topic. Personally, I suspect a certain variety of conservative harbors a wish to destroy relatively peaceful communalism and replace it with a certain kind of openly hostile individualism that requires guns to maintain itself.