brabus

I think what you describe exists all over, just have to promote them better and entice people to go. A tight knit community is a great way to help this problem - it will make people actually care about others outside of themselves. Every neighborhood needs the 1 or 2 houses who are always down to host a weekend hang out or a party for no reason (or reason, whatever). Everyone else bring what’s needed so the host isn’t paying for it all. It’s really that easy, just need Americans to get back to the time where you knew your neighbors and sought out their company. That exists is parts of the US, but it doesn’t exist in too many places.

What Lloyd said. The church was our society’s meeting place and source of morals and values (specifically the ones that transcend religion). Now social media and the MSM has replaced the church, both packed with anti-family and anti-moral garbage. And there in lies Pandora’s box - were never going back from SM (which is probably the worst thing to have ever happened to us in the modern era). So the only course correct now is parents need to sack up and actually work at maintaining a stable family and raising their kids correctly. They need to also help their local communities do this by being involved/aware about school issues. All the millions of people who hate all the BS going on, but are too big of pussies to stand up and say/do something, need to sack up and stop being weak candy asses. Some of you reading this right now are those pussies, I guarantee it. Do some introspection, then get off your asses and do something about the BS. How can you be willing to get in a gun fight, but you won’t speak at school board meetings? Why aren’t you or your spouse running for school board, city council, etc? Why do you complain to your neighbor over beers about all the trans mental health issues being pushed on kids, but you say nothing about your kids “celebrate trans or you’re a bigot” homework? If these describe you, even indirectly, you’re fucking up. But the good part is you can recognize it, and fix it.

I’ve been on “the list” for > $15k twice. Just laughed at them every time they said pay it off and the gov will get you back, it’s going to hurt your credit, blah blah. Carried $19k 6 months past due. No credit hit, just empty threats from FM douche bags. Don’t ever pay that shit off with your own money.

Religion aside, I think it’s because those other countries are doing far better at parenting: building the moral base, holding kids accountable, less kids being entitled shits with zero fucks given for authority, etc. The US has the highest rate in the world of children living in single parent homes, and by a large margin. The “nuclear family” is very important to not creating societal nightmares out of children, and our country is epically failing at this, far more than any other peer out there.

I think it is from their perspective. They entice people to sign a year or two before the average person realizes AD sucks balls compared to the ARC, airlines, etc. (for many people, not all of course). Now as those people approach their 10 yr point and realize their mistake, it’ll be too late. Many of those people will probably just resign themselves to 20 years. It’s a good idea from the AD perspective. Hopefully those O-3s at 6-9 years of service don’t have low SA and fall for the trap.

OK, I see where you’re going. But things like social media, smart phones with TikTok, who kids associate with, what is done with kid’s education, what values/morals they’re taught from a young age (i.e. their “moral base”that’s built early in life), what movies/shows/video games they’re allowed to consume, and more - 100% completely within purview, control, and responsibility of parents. If parents aren’t around to do their job or they abrogate it to society, they are at fault for the outcome. So yes, parent’s failures (either not being present or not doing their job even when around) are the ultimate RC of the terrible societal products many children become…and the cycle continues. Fix the prevalent lazy/absent/shitty parents in our modern society and you’ll fix a lot of the issues in our country. But that takes selfless work, and by and large a huge portion of America are selfish and lazy today.

“Sir, I went there for the high quality steak dinner, that’s all I paid for, I swear!” ”Why are there 3x ATM withdrawals for $300 each spread across a 4 hr period” ”uhhhh….”

I have a friend who accidentally used his GTC at a strip club. But he didn’t say shit and paid it off like normal. Zero questions asked. Two entities you never confide to: finance about mistaken GTC use and game wardens about mistaken game issues. Both will burn you at the stake for a 100% unintentional mistaken identity problem that’s sometimes easy to make.

Wow, what an astute argument. Are you trolling, or do you actually think a parental leadership vacuum makes no difference in a child’s direction in life?

Plenty. Go look up the correlation between decreasing % of homes without fathers and increasing crime, poverty, etc. Look up “father status” of criminals and juveniles with misdemeanors.

And the discipline is up to your SQ/CC, so unless someone has an absolute douche bag of a SQ/CC, they’ll be fine. I remember some admin person telling me I had to use a GTC for something, I said “don’t care,” and that’s when they threw out your sq/cc could punish you…I think I LOL’d and just walked away. I was pretty confident I could slap that thing down at Palominos (for dinner obviously!) and he wouldn’t give a fuck.

Completely agree. The black community in America has suffered greatly from the reduction of fathers in the house. The breakdown of families has hurt them more than anything else since the 60s.

County sheriff spoke at an event a while ago. Someone asked him why he thought our area crime was much lower than other areas with similar population. His response: “I think it’s because it’s widely known so many people have firearms here that criminals are far less likely to take risks.” And while crime does happen, a few incidents have involved dead criminals and the cops saying, “yeah that checks, have a nice day sir/ma’am.”

@Pooter Ok, so the root cause is a specific type of inanimate object that is a motionless paperweight until a human with free will decides to be a POS and picks it up? Shitty diets, fast food, etc. kills WAY more people than firearms. Vehicle accidents kill double the people that guns do (I’m not counting suicides, many of those gun-related deaths are legal and justified, and many are criminal-on-criminal related, meaning no “innocent” people were killed). Where’s everyone calling for the ban of these inanimate objects that require human free will to use? The point of the above: it’s an illogical argument that inanimate objects are a RC of anything. Humans with free will are the RC of things based on the decisions they make (decide to kill someone, drive like a jackass, eat the 69th Big Mac even thought they have 3 different heart diseases). - In 2020 we were still at a lower murder w/ gun rate than 1974, and 2020 was a bad year in general. Murder w/ gun rates was fairly stable from 2000-2015, and then made a sharp rise from there, despite increasing gun sales over that entire time period. In fact, gun sales have risen steadily while murders have sharply declined over decades until that significant rise in 2015. There’s literally a negative correlation between the two. Guns didn’t change, so what else did? - # households with a gun has been DECLINING since the 60s, as increasing gun sales go to people with multiple (e.g. hunters and shooting hobbyists). Murderers using guns haven’t typically been the guy who has a large collection at home, it’s the deranged idiot who bought a gun last week/owns a couple or the gang banger/criminal who illegally acquired a gun and used it in nefarious activities (e.g. drug related). - It was common place not that long ago to see school parking lots filled with guns. It was not that long ago when kids brought rifles into school and stuffed them in their locker for use later that day in a school-sanctioned shooting event or hunting after school. No school shootings happened during this time. So, objectively and subjectively firearms do not have the correlation to un-justified murder that some people/gov members and the media want to claim. They are less involved in death than many other things in our country. They are a convenient boogeyman, but the facts do not support that “boogeyman status.” So now we’re back to the start of this discussion - what has changed this century (roughly starting from Columbine) compared to the 20th century? Well, generally positive morals and values were far more important and cohesive family units were more prevalent in the past. People were far more likely to understand the value of human life, even if they didn’t like someone. People were more apt to care about a stranger than they are today. So yeah, society has changed for the worse and is ultimately driving worse behavior. Perhaps we’ve opened Pandora’s box and we can’t put it back in. But, I do believe concrete solutions involve mental health services and campaigns/grass roots to minimize things that lead to mental health issues (#1: be a good parent, #2: community involvement to teach caring about others/reduce selfishness). We need to look hard into tying mental health to firearm access; I’m undecided on the best way to do that, but clearly something needs to be done. I agree with your immediate solution of hardening schools. My kid’s school has many concealed carrying people in it - every school should do this. Every school should have locked doors with controlled access. Combine those two things and you have a significant deterrent/significantly better chance of stopping a shooting/minimizing damage. Bottom line: I’m just as frustrated as others with how things are going in our country regarding murder, especially of children. I don’t want anyone’s kids to be in these situations. But, I want to actually solve the problem, and those who grasp at guns don’t give a fuck about solving the problem, as they are incapable or unwilling to identify the root cause and work towards solving that. It’s a difficult problem and I’m not arguing there’s an easy solution, but it’s disingenuous to say you care when all you do is yell #noguns in the face of the facts, with no effort put towards real solutions.

@FourFans Good points but you’re going nowhere. Prozac is an idiot who votes a blind D ticket just like every idiot who votes a blind R ticket. To further demo the balance of this problem, his statement above makes him as delusional/uninformed/blind as the people who happily push for trump in the primaries. They’re no different from each other, just one is on the D side and the other is on the R side. These people will always exist in our society, unfortunately. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink…

I think most of us have zero desire to vote for him again. At least he got the silent treatment from the crowd when he mocked Desantis like a child at his last rally. Hopefully that’s an indicator of what’s to come. The RNC is absolutely fucking retarded if they nominate him again, as he’s probably the one guy who can actually lose to Biden.

To your first (unquoted) point, I don’t know that Medicaid is the answer, but I am for diverting money from colossally wasteful spending and putting it towards mental health services. To be clear, I do not support more total spending or new taxes, I support throwing Peter off the cliff to pay Paul. Firearms (or hammers, or prescription drugs, etc.) is irrelevant. What’s relevant is we have a systemic issue with not just mental health, but also rapidly declining societal norms and values. Those two things tied together are the RC of our issues that manifest in many ways, one of them being evil shitheads who shoot kids. Grndpndr’s post is a small visual presentation of that. But most importantly, we collectively see far less value in other human life than we used to. We’re not ISIS, but we’re sliding that way (in terms of zero fucks given for the lives of others who aren’t us/our circle). So why has this happened? I could list a thousand things that have driven our society down the toilet, and I believe we specifically have declined further than other first world countries (likely because we have more money and innovative capability that has netted us some really negative things, amongst all the great stuff too of course).

Another mental health case kills kids in a school, and predictably all the dems can talk about is gun laws. Not one mention of the shooter’s mental health illness, specifically trans in this case. They do not give one genuine fuck about saving kids, they care only about power. I’ll keep saying it, if all you talk about is guns and don’t talk about/do anything to address mental health and societal issues, you do not care about kids at all because you refuse to identify and address the RC.

The root cause of all of these kids doing this is shitty parents. Either shitty because they support their kid having a mental health crisis, or so detached from their kid’s life they had no idea any of this was happening until too late. Either way they failed their kid, horrifically.

So what is China’s takeaway from this? I’m not sure what they can take away from this that means anything beyond the square root of fuck all. I mean, I guess they can take away that the gov doesn’t want to talk about stuff like this, but then felt pressured to when joe blow posted it. Cool, you caught the Tater China, well done.

That news piece makes me chuckle… Meh, believe what you want.

And if he kills a 5th person, it’ll be because of white privilege.

Hmmm, we’ll that’s one assumption without supporting evidence. The timeline was politically driven, not capabilities driven.

“Wait, you don’t need $469k/yr to make end’s meat? I don’t get it.” - Doug, 17 yr 7ER FO, has 3x secret families who don’t know about each other

I agree. But it still concerns me when enough people to spike the RWR are talking about civil war. It also concerns me when radical people on either side continue to push radical agendas in the face of opposition from what I’ll call “the reasonable” core of our population. There’s far more reasonable people than not, but don’t think that means we can afford to just brush off the crazies and say, “meh, they’ll just go away.” That kind of flippant attitude is exactly how we end up in a very bad spot years down the road.