Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
--- Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jan Coffey wrote: A society where everyone was carrying a weapon would be a society where the week and the meek would have equal power when they walk out of their front door. It would be More peacefull and provide for More equality. rolls eyes Yea, like the gangs in our cities that all have guns. They're oh so equal in the cemetery. Sorry, but the above is a tired cliché that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. Then why do Texas and Nevada have less violent crime? Where is all the major gang activity? In states that have very strong gun laws. Besides you are making my point. How long do you think it is going to be before those same gangsters realize that YOUR nigborhood where most people don't own guns is a lot easier to pilage than the hood down the street where they know their rival gang is packing. I beleive that for a weaponless society to work, we must first experience have tactical equality. Your formula assumes that everyone that is week and meek wants a gun. Are you going to force people to carry guns so that they are equal? Then there is the matter of temperament. many of the gun deaths in this country occur when normally law abiding citizens loose it and start shooting. I don't believe that. Then there is the matter of accidents. Simple solution, teach a class in gun safty in school. Replace the 10th 11th or 12th year of english those clases are a waste. Your formula assumes that all gun owners will be responsible, keeping their weapons out of the hands of minors and taking appropriate safety measures. Yes, I believe that law abiding citizens are responsible, well meaning, do not contribute to the delinquincy of minors, and are interested in safty. Much more so than I trust a society and the mercy of thugs, who no matter what you do, are allways going to have guns. All that being said, there are too much a cult of arms in this country to make firearms illegal. Though the courts have ruled that the second amendment does not allow unlimited access to firearms people continue to believe that deadly force is their right. Some people do not believe in the softening of the rights our forfathers invisoned. So be it. What we need to do is to encourage responsibility with the law. Weapons should be registered. Done Owners should be trained. Done Penalties for abuse should be persuasive. Done And the laws should be homogenous so that individuals can't skirt them by driving a few miles. Agreed, let's use Nevada's laws everywhere. = _ Jan William Coffey _ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
Jon Gabriel wrote: I can't speak to that, but I did almost flunk art due to my color-blindness. I think they should make exceptions due to disabilities. And I almost failed an elective class in typing that I took in junior high, because my fat fingers were too clumsy. She was very strict about counting typos against my grade. I just wanted to take the class so it could speed up typing programs into my computer, which doesn't require the kind of anal grading she gave. I eventually had to pull out of the class, to keep it from hurting my overall grade. I never did learn how to touch-type, and I currently use a two-fingered hunting-and-pecking style that works OK for me. __ Steve Sloan . Huntsville, Alabama = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brin-L list pages .. http://www.brin-l.org Chmeee's 3D Objects http://www.sloan3d.com/chmeee 3D and Drawing Galleries .. http://www.sloansteady.com Software Science Fiction, Science, and Computer Links Science fiction scans . http://www.sloan3d.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
Jan Coffey wrote: A society where everyone was carrying a weapon would be a society where the week and the meek would have equal power when they walk out of their front door. It would be More peacefull and provide for More equality. rolls eyes Yea, like the gangs in our cities that all have guns. They're oh so equal in the cemetery. Sorry, but the above is a tired cliché that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. I beleive that for a weaponless society to work, we must first experience have tactical equality. Your formula assumes that everyone that is week and meek wants a gun. Are you going to force people to carry guns so that they are equal? Then there is the matter of temperament. many of the gun deaths in this country occur when normally law abiding citizens loose it and start shooting. Then there is the matter of accidents. Your formula assumes that all gun owners will be responsible, keeping their weapons out of the hands of minors and taking appropriate safety measures. All that being said, there are too much a cult of arms in this country to make firearms illegal. Though the courts have ruled that the second amendment does not allow unlimited access to firearms people continue to believe that deadly force is their right. So be it. What we need to do is to encourage responsibility with the law. Weapons should be registered. Owners should be trained. Penalties for abuse should be persuasive. And the laws should be homogenous so that individuals can't skirt them by driving a few miles. Doug ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
Jan Coffey wrote: --- Jon Gabriel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 09:13:49 -0500 Jan Coffey wrote: --- Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Then there is the matter of accidents. Simple solution, teach a class in gun safty in school. Replace the 10th 11th or 12th year of english those clases are a waste. 1) I didn't consider any of those classes I took those years to be a waste, personally. Neither do I. In fact, the foundation of writing skills and language analysis they established probably allow me to do my job effectively. An observation: Just because a required class may not help you personally doesn't mean it's worthless. For example, I may never use the trigonometry that I learned about in HS in my daily life, but it's essential to everything from construction to chemistry. I wasn't saying to do away with all 3 years, just one. Besides no one made you take 12 years of triginomotry, or 12 years of art history. or 12 years of colour theory. Why do you think that 12 years of english is necisary? Did you really learn anything in 10th,11th or 12th grade you didn't already know in 9th? The only difference in these classes was the publisher of the book, and the words on the spelling tests. Granted for me, the spelling tests were like automatic Fs due to my genetics, which I did find teribly unfair. But still, for everyone else the rest of the information was 3 years of re-run. How many times can you be tought to diagram a sentence before you just don't care anymore. How many times can you go around a class reading shakespear aloud? Is it really necisary to subject students to Beowofe 3 years in a row? How many compare-contrast papers can one write? I'm sorry that's how your high school English classes went. I was studying very different things in 10th, 11th and 12th grades. 10th: Writing for half the year, followed the second half of the year by a course on writing research papers, a skill I hadn't quite got down pat -- but after that class, I did *very* well on research papers in college. 11th: English was combined with American History in an honors course that met for 2 periods a day. So everything we turned in was graded on content by the history teacher, and on English by the English teacher. Plus there were a lot of group projects; I learned a lot about working in a group, one of my weak points then. I drew on skills learned in that class very heavily in a couple of classes in college, most notably a *fun* course offered in the English department at UT one semester, Artificial Intelligences in Literature. (Hey, _Neuromancer_ was on the required reading list. How cool is *that*?) 12th: A full year course Themes in Literature where we did all that compare/contrast stuff, but I honed my skills in writing papers, which helped in college courses later on. *Plus* I took a half-year course in Speech and Communication, which at least got me over the panic I'd been feeling for the past year when it was apparent that there was no way I *wouldn't* be valedictorian. And I got exposed to a number of cool things in that course that I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to, by other students picking topics interesting to them for various assignments. So, it wasn't 3 years of the same old thing for me, it was a lot of variety. After fulfilling basic freshman English requirements in college, I went for some eclectic courses *there*, as well. Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
Jan Coffey wrote: Why do you think that 12 years of english is necisary? Did you really learn anything in 10th,11th or 12th grade you didn't already know in 9th? At my high school, in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, we were required to do a research paper (10 to 20 pages) every year in English, and each year we used a different documentation style (footnotes, endnotes, and internal documentation). In 11th grade we could take a standard English course and then in 12th grade we had to take a one-semester English course, or in 11th we could start a two-year English AP or English IB course. During 9 through 12, we covered everything from basic grammer through literary analysis, poetry, creative writing, structural differences between short stories and novels, and general history of different writing styles of the past couple of hundred years, among other things. Math was set up in a similar way. After taking a year of Algebra in 8th grade and a year of Geometry in 9th, we could either take a year of Intermediate Algebra and then a one-semester course like Statistics, or we could take Advanced Algebra (with the option of going on to Pre-Calc and Trig and eventually Calculus -- I opted out of the year-long senior Calculus class to take the one-semester Statistics instead, which let me take another one-semester class I wanted). I learned a *lot* in English and Math in 10th through 12th grade that I didn't already know from 9th. I'm sorry to hear that you were not so lucky. Reggie Bautista _ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
--- Jon Gabriel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 09:13:49 -0500 Jan Coffey wrote: --- Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Then there is the matter of accidents. Simple solution, teach a class in gun safty in school. Replace the 10th 11th or 12th year of english those clases are a waste. 1) I didn't consider any of those classes I took those years to be a waste, personally. Neither do I. In fact, the foundation of writing skills and language analysis they established probably allow me to do my job effectively. An observation: Just because a required class may not help you personally doesn't mean it's worthless. For example, I may never use the trigonometry that I learned about in HS in my daily life, but it's essential to everything from construction to chemistry. I wasn't saying to do away with all 3 years, just one. Besides no one made you take 12 years of triginomotry, or 12 years of art history. or 12 years of colour theory. Why do you think that 12 years of english is necisary? Did you really learn anything in 10th,11th or 12th grade you didn't already know in 9th? The only difference in these classes was the publisher of the book, and the words on the spelling tests. Granted for me, the spelling tests were like automatic Fs due to my genetics, which I did find teribly unfair. But still, for everyone else the rest of the information was 3 years of re-run. How many times can you be tought to diagram a sentence before you just don't care anymore. How many times can you go around a class reading shakespear aloud? Is it really necisary to subject students to Beowofe 3 years in a row? How many compare-contrast papers can one write? The way we teach English in this country is akin to spending a smester a year teaching 1st 2nd 3ed and 4th graders how to tie shoes. = _ Jan William Coffey _ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
Jan Coffey wrote: --- Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Then there is the matter of accidents. Simple solution, teach a class in gun safty in school. Replace the 10th 11th or 12th year of english those clases are a waste. 1) I didn't consider any of those classes I took those years to be a waste, personally. 2) I'm not sure that the person I was in high school would have handled a gun safety course all that well. I'm keenly interested in taking one *now*, but I've done a lot of growing and thinking about the whole thing since high school. Just my opinion. (I didn't like taking driver's ed when I had to, either, but part of that was the specific instructor, I think.) Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
From: Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 09:13:49 -0500 Jan Coffey wrote: --- Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Then there is the matter of accidents. Simple solution, teach a class in gun safty in school. Replace the 10th 11th or 12th year of english those clases are a waste. 1) I didn't consider any of those classes I took those years to be a waste, personally. Neither do I. In fact, the foundation of writing skills and language analysis they established probably allow me to do my job effectively. An observation: Just because a required class may not help you personally doesn't mean it's worthless. For example, I may never use the trigonometry that I learned about in HS in my daily life, but it's essential to everything from construction to chemistry. Jon Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re:_Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No matter what laws get passed, no matter who can leagaly cary a gun and who can't Criminals will allways own and carry guns. Right, and other criminals will always commit crimes, so why have any laws at all? A much more interesting statistic would be the perentage of non-law-enforcement people who carry a conceled weapons who are also non-criminals. Personsly I would prefer there to be more non-criminals with concealed weapons than criminals with concealed weapons, but proponents of gun control laws seem to prefer it if ONLY criminals carry weapons. No we don't. We don't want anyone to have a gun who doesn't have a good reason to have one. And we don't feel it is impossible to cut down on the sheer extraordinarily huge number of guns circulating in our society. Difficult, especially given the grinding political power of the NRA, but why should it be so easy to buy a gun in Virginia that criminals drive down from New York to stock up on guns and then drive them back up to New York to sell? Nobody really needs a gun. Seriously. Soap Box So, you would prefer the largest, and strongest to be the only ones who can weild lethal force? Or do you beleive that everyone else should practice martial arts? You are not going to change human nature with restrictive gun laws, you are only going to change the balance of power. Right now our laws are broken. Like it or not -some- humans are violent. That is just the way it is. And as long as that is the case there must be some way to level the feild. Right now our laws are broken. Guns level the feild. A big strong angry man is no match for a small frail woman with a P99-40. Give them both a gun and it's equal odds. Criminals don't like equal odds. They would rather not commit the crime than do one that has a 50-50 chance of failure. Like I said our laws are broken. Only the criminal has the wapon and they can be rather certain that most people are not carrying a gun, so they have the upper hand. It's like our laws tell them, here are a bunch of sitting ducks, have fun! Look at all the babbies with candy! And of course that is auful and those people are terible, but you can't run and put your head in the sand and pretend that it isn't like that. You can't pretend that we live in an evolved STTNG society. We don't! We live in a Wild West society, only now, only the bad guys have the guns. A gunless society, a society that didn't need to have power balanced would be a wonderful society to live in. But unfortunatly we don't live in such a society, we live in a society that ~Requires~ something to balance tactical power. Only, our laws have taken that away from us, our laws have shifted the balance of power to benifit the criminal. One might say that they don't want to live in a society where everyone is carrying a gun on their hip, but what would not be realized is that is the exact same society we DO live in, only the guns are hidden, and only the _chriminals_ have them unless you live in Texas or Nevada. A society where everyone was carrying a weapon would be a society where the week and the meek would have equal power when they walk out of their front door. It would be More peacefull and provide for More equality. I beleive that for a weaponless society to work, we must first experience have tactical equality. /Soap Box If you absolutely have to have one (and I don't know why you would), you should have to demonstrate that need, demonstrate proper training in its use, be required to own insurance against any possible misuse of your gun by you or by anyone else (thus giving you a powerful incentive to take good care of it). I'm not talking about hunters or target-shooters, but they tend to be much more responsible about taking care of their weapons than the gun nuts symbolized by Phil Gramm, who, when asked how many guns he had, replied, More than I need but not as many as I want. Guns are dangerous. Pure and simple. It may not be possible to get rid of them entirely, but that should be our society's goal. Meanwhile, let's settle for what limitations we can get. Tom Beck www.prydonians.org www.mercerjewishsingles.org I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I never dreamed I'd see the last. - Dr Jerry Pournelle ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l = _ Jan William Coffey _ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination
From: Jan Coffey [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 11:25:53 -0700 (PDT) --- Jon Gabriel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: _Politics,_was_[L3]_Re:_fight_the_evil_of _pricediscrimination Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 09:13:49 -0500 Jan Coffey wrote: --- Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Then there is the matter of accidents. Simple solution, teach a class in gun safty in school. Replace the 10th 11th or 12th year of english those clases are a waste. 1) I didn't consider any of those classes I took those years to be a waste, personally. Neither do I. In fact, the foundation of writing skills and language analysis they established probably allow me to do my job effectively. An observation: Just because a required class may not help you personally doesn't mean it's worthless. For example, I may never use the trigonometry that I learned about in HS in my daily life, but it's essential to everything from construction to chemistry. I wasn't saying to do away with all 3 years, just one. Besides no one made you take 12 years of triginomotry, or 12 years of art history. or 12 years of colour theory. Well, a better analogy might be that I had 12 years of Math as well as English. (Trig wasn't the only thing taught just as Jane Eyre wasn't the only book taught.) I'm sure I learned a lot in those math classes that I will never use. I still think it was appropriate to take them. A well-rounded education is better than none. Why do you think that 12 years of english is necisary? Did you really learn anything in 10th,11th or 12th grade you didn't already know in 9th? Yes. Definitely. It wasn't all Shakespeare and Beowulf. Sophmore and Junior year a great deal of our workload was increasing vocabulary and reading comprehension skills to help us do well on the SAT's and ACT's. Senior year we concentrated on English lit, book analysis and poetry. We had essays and reports due weekly. I probably learned more about writing and analyzing different literary styles in those three years than during my first two years of college. It serves me in good stead these days. Our experiences may be different. I took advanced placement English courses in High School. As a result, the workload was accelerated and the subjects were more varied. The only difference in these classes was the publisher of the book, and the words on the spelling tests. Granted for me, the spelling tests were like automatic Fs due to my genetics, which I did find teribly unfair. I can't speak to that, but I did almost flunk art due to my color-blindness. I think they should make exceptions due to disabilities. But still, for everyone else the rest of the information was 3 years of re-run. How many times can you be tought to diagram a sentence before you just don't care anymore. How many times can you go around a class reading shakespear aloud? Is it really necisary to subject students to Beowofe 3 years in a row? How many compare-contrast papers can one write? The way we teach English in this country is akin to spending a smester a year teaching 1st 2nd 3ed and 4th graders how to tie shoes. My experience in the NYC school system was very different. Jon Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
