Guess the Jussie Smollet case wasn’t enough to show you how dangerous Chicago is… SMH
I was robbed at gunpoint in 1998 in Hegewisch. Missed my turn, decided to cut through an alley, which was a dead-end and there was snow on the ground. As I was trying to turn the car around I had loaded revolver pointed at my face.
He took my cash but left my $500 Sector watch I had on. I never called it in to report it. I just went home to Indiana.
The only crimes I’ve had committed against me in Lewiston would be assault when I worked bar security, which is to be expected.
We aren’t as bad as the worst parts of Chicago, but we’re definitely on that trajectory right now and sinking fast. I know a number of victims, some deceased, of serious criminal violence. A man was gunned down about 1,000 ft down the hill from the first apartment we lived in when I moved here. A friend was stabbed a mile from my house last year at the gas station I fill up at. It’s definitely happening here.
This stuff was virtually unheard of 20 years ago, when Lewiston was safer than any city of 40,000 you would be able to find in the greater Chicago area. Years would go by with no shootings at all. Now it is typically days or maybe weeks if we’re on a good stretch.
I was in the Millennium Park area of downtown a year ago and was actually quite impressed with how safe Chicago seemed. It was much more welcoming to families than downtown Lewiston is today. I was harassed by precisely zero drug addicts in the midst of a psychotic break with zero people banging on my car window.
Maybe Lightfoot wasn’t such a terrible Mayor after all, even if she was a non-stop fountain of joke material.
1 Like
It’s really only 3 streets of nonstop violence. And most of the guns are from Indiana, which is why the example of “gun laws not working” is stupid. It’s like saying you can pee in this corner of the pool and then get suprised by piss when you’re on the other side.
Oh I’m very familiar with the idea that if only Indiana would adopt Chicago gun control laws the warzone conditions in parts of the city would surely subside.
That’s been the argument for my whole adult life.
Ya… suspect af from the get-go. Scum bag pos.
1 Like
I agree it’s s a stupid argument to fix the Chicago issues, I just think it’s disingenuous to point to Chicago as an example of gun control not working.
They get the same treatment as American workers. Or are we saying that other people are inherently inferior?
Tell Ayn Rand that. The Republican party under Reagan believed it. Capitalism hasn’t been championed as morally superior to communism?
Greed? Let me think if that’s considered morally virtuous. I wonder what I’ll conclude.
Gun control begins and ends with the person holding it.
That sounds like a place on earth called “No Place”. There’s a Greek word for it that gets a little over-used, but it sounds like you’re imagining it.
Meanwhile, people tend to do what they can with what they’ve got across every society in history, often in spite of the outraged cries of upper middle class white liberals in the USA who are upset that someone invested a bunch of money that creates opportunities in poverty-stricken areas.
They call it exploitation and would be perfectly content if the sweatshop didn’t exist at all with the people simply stuck in dire poverty but unexploited by an employer.
It betrays a complete cluelessness of what poverty is and how societies emerge from it.
1 Like
But that’s another thread. I agree with you about all the capitalist shit.
And Ayn Rand is a truly bizzare human being.
If you read Utopia, you would know that it sounds nothing like it.
This may have made some sense in your mind, and maybe you think it’s persuasive, but the response to it is: why are they still stuck in dire poverty in spite of working in sweat shops? Sounds like maybe you are the one with visions of utopia.
I get the argument for gun control with regard to controlling the guns themselves. And maybe it would be effective or at least more effective than doing nothing. However, I see it as a cop out to avoid addressing the real issues which are related to the environment and how it creates sociopaths who have no concept of the value of human life.
She was a soulless hobgoblin and all around piece of garbage that managed to convince some people she was a genius.
Poverty is a lack of resources and the starting point for every society.
What are material resources, and where do they come from?
What is an education system, and where does it come from?
What is an opportunity, and where do they come from?
Why do I have the opportunity to work at Bath Iron Works where the most sophisticated naval vessels in the world are constructed, but someone in Cameroon doesn’t? Why don’t they just create a shipbuilding industry?
The answer has always been the same, and people who share your line of thought tend to wreck societies that others have built while completely failing to lift anyone out of poverty. That’s how places like Venezuela take massive leaps backwards, by listening to people like you who confuse pointing out imperfect situations with building a better society.
Like most leftist lines of thought, you are assuming zero agency on the part of people leftists determine to be victims. Of course parents want better for their kids than sweatshop work, scrap salvage or cobalt mining, but unlike you, those parents are forced to live in reality, not No Place.
1 Like
I think that American moral balance is halfway between internalized objectivist confidence and Catholic guilt.
Before Trump (#fuck MAGA) this was one of the weirdest pictures in politics.
How can she be your favorite author and then claim RATM is your favorite band?
Here’s our reality:
“You will own nothing and be happy”
It’s also the ending point. Unless you believe in utopia and see America spreading its quality of life, one sweat shop at a time. And I thought commies were delusional.
You should also have realized by now that you can’t trigger me. It’s why I ignore 90% of your posts and don’t respond to it. I defend my positions, not myself. I only say this as a friend who’s trying to keep you from wasting time posting things that I won’t react to.
They both are signs of poor taste and sophomoric thinking. Rand and RATM, a bunch of simpletons on opposite ends of the political spectrum.
I don’t think they care about the happy part. People are perfectly fine with being angry.