100% agree. Right now, when something "happens" I leave it alone for a couple days until the real information comes out. Remember the "terrorist attack" at the Rainbow Bridge on the Canadian border a couple days ago?
Speaking as an American, I can tell you that pictures of dead kids is not going to do anything to further the gun control agenda. Nobody but a madman supports murdering children. In fact, murder is illegal in this country, as is assault and brandishing firearms. These laws don't stop insane people from using weapons to murder people. Just like strict knife laws don't stop stabbing. The problem is society is degrading to a point where people are willing to take lives.
The more I see dead kids from a school shooting, the more I will advocate for armed guards at schools to help dissuade would-be shooters from attempting anything. I would also advocate for the abolition of "Gun-Free Zones" as they only advertise to criminals that nobody is likely to be armed in these areas.
Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.
Uniform regulation across an entire country makes a hell of a difference.
The EU has a uniform gun regulation zone, the UK has even enforcement, Australia didn't "ban guns" it simply made a few low population territories and states adopt the same regulations as other high population states had; 12 year olds can join gun clubs, every sale requires a registered seller and and a background check for the buyer, contractors can get semi automatics for feral pig culling, my neighbour here has an arsenal of weapons for shooting at all distances out to 5,000+ yards (yes, ULR five thousand yard shooting is a thing here).
The USofA isn't at all united wrt gun regulation.
Twue patriots seem to love moving weapons across state lines and arming conflict areas for profit, no real readily accessed central database, tip toeing around removing weapons from domestic violence offenders who can readily replace what, if anything, is taken.
Australia once held the world record for victims of a single mass shooter - we've had nothing remotely like that since uniform regulation and enforcement.
Pick your favorite race and check the stats for race-on-race shootings in the US. You'll surely find that it's more than the population-adjusted equivalent the ~30 gun killings we get per year in the UK. Race obviously isn't the key factor here. I do wonder why you would even bring it up.
I could also mention that London, which is comparably racially diverse to many major US cities, has far less gun violence than any of them.
There are millions stolen guns in the US and a lot of gun crime is committed with illegal weapons. Normally you’d only see so many black market firearms in a former war zone.
Why don't you just Google "uk man arrested for tweet" and you'll find plenty.
From the Verge[1]: Section 127 of the Communications Act makes it an offense to send public messages of a “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character,”
Do I think threats are acceptable, no - and true threats aren't considered protected free speech. ("true threats first amendment" would be your search term, should you like to learn more)
Do I think offensive, nasty, hateful speech is free speech? Absolutely.
Sorry this really is a weak argument. First of all, "free speech" is not and shouldn't be considered absolute. Freedom to express your ideas, yes. Freedom to be obscene? No.
We are not granted rights by the Government. We have natural rights and they are not to be infringed by the Government. That's how our Constitution is supposed to work and that's why we left England in the first place.
Sure, some speech isn’t protected. You can’t threaten the President for example.
But the fact is, the question of whether speech is or is not allowed is far too often a matter of commercial viability rather than objective political value. Look no further than Kanye West being “cancelled” only after a long history of racism and idiotic remarks. The profitability of his Yeezy shoes bought him a lot more free speech than you or I would ever be granted.
Couple that with the fact that healthcare is usually at the mercy of your employer, and very few people in the U.S. truly have the liberty to say what they really think. And before you say there’s nothing worth saying which you would be fired for, ask yourself how long you could maintain good graces if you were known to be promoting unionization.
Actually, you can threaten the president. Several celebrities posted images of Trump beheaded and were not arrested, and were indeed met with wide acclaim.
Doesn't seem enforced unless there's actual steps taken. I'm just saying what I've seen. I've heard many baseless threats made against various presidents and no one cares.
Rights aren’t simply the absence of enforcement. The fact that threats against the president aren’t prosecuted doesn’t make those threats protected 1A speech.
You get that there's a difference between the men with guns coming to put you in a cage, and your employer deciding they don't like you anymore, right?
I think most people in the UK are more worried about getting fired than they are worried about going to jail for a tweet, FWIW. (Although of course, in the UK your employer can’t fire you just because they decide that they “don’t like you anymore”.)
> Amazing that a US colleague of mine was fired for saying "fuck" to another US colleague. Really free country that with protected speech...
Well did he sue? That's the only way he can get the government involved and see if his speech is protected or not.
Edit: Do the down voters have problems understanding basic logic? The government can't protect anybody's free speech if they haven't been informed about a potential violation. I know most hackers think that the government is God, but they are neither all-seeing nor all-knowing. If you get fired in a way that violates your freedom of speech or violates labour rights, you have to sue and at least get the government involved before you complain about not having any rights.
> You can go to jail in the UK for a drunk tweet on X (twitter). That is not a free society at it's core.
You could go to jail in the US for a myriad of things that aren't even crimes in the UK. Public urination, for instance. And the US incarceration rate is 4x that of the UK.
While that's true - in fact you are if anything downplaying the UKs lack of free speech, as people are convicted for far less - it's not very germane to the UK having lower homicide rates.
I feel like most of us want to live in societies with freedom of speech and low homicide rates, and don't feel it has to be one or the other.
Assuming that most people who truly believe that the US is a beacon of freedom to the world, are, at the very least, mildly informed about current events, it is astonishing how they bend reality to fit these beliefs.
The US has one of the highest prison population per capita in the world. It also arguably has some of the most heavily armed, most unchecked, police forces in the western hemisphere. And here we are, with some arguing that saying nazi shit on Twitter is "proof of freedom".
> Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.
You've (collectively) already fallen for it by allowing the government to develop a standing army (and not just any standing army, but possibly the most capable in the world of crushing any dissent even if it happens halfway across the globe).
As James Madison put it in 1787, "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." Or Samuel Adams called it, "always dangerous to the Liberties of the People."
> You've (collectively) already fallen for it by allowing the government to develop a standing army (and not just any standing army, but possibly the most capable in the world of crushing any dissent even if it happens halfway across the globe).
The military is a non-factor in this, for a lot of reasons. Here are a few:
- What percentage of our armed forces will take their oath to the constitution (not the government) seriously, and will desert/change sides when asked to murder their own people? I expect a lot, but even if zero of them bailed, that's the least of the issues with trying to fight your own citizens...
- What good is all of that military hardware against yourself? Tanks, jets, drones, missiles... sure, you can turn major cities to glass but then what the hell do you even rule over? The US military is great at crushing dissent across the globe because the collateral damage has been deemed acceptable (by us, because we're not THERE). If you start doing any of that shit here, public sentiment will turn on you fast and you'll make millions of domestic enemies instantly.
- The US has 400 million people (ish) and just as many guns (again, ish). The US military is like 2 million, including reserves. Say 90% of people refuse to fight, well that still makes it 40 million vs 2 million. Those odds SUCK. And that's without anyone refusing orders and bailing to the other side (bring some of the hardware with ya!).
- This wouldn't be a traditional war, it would look like all the wars (ahem, military actions) that the US lost and continues to lose. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Our military keeps taking an L to dudes with 40 year old surplus rifles and busted Toyota trucks. Because that style of warfare is asymmetric and HARD to do without creating new enemies at every turn.
There is no version of a civil war that ends well for an established US government trying to subjugate its people BECAUSE of the 2nd amendment. Either rule over piles of glowing, radioactive rubble, or face the reality that it's open season on anything in a uniform and you're outnumbered 200:1 BUT you don't even know who you're fighting until you're already getting shot at. That's the intent of the 2nd, the US military doesn't actually pose a threat to its people because it simply can't win.
That being said... the US government knows all of this, and is just boiling the frog instead. Small oversteps over a long period of time add up to some real nonsense, and I'm not sure your average American has the balls to stand up, say "enough is enough", and push back. Old us threw the damn tea into the ocean (in front of the bastards!), current us will go on an angry rant on X while ordering Doordash. There will be more governmental overreach, there will be more boiling the frog, and who knows how it'll end. But the US military isn't remotely a factor.
> Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.
Oppressive leaders have historically used armed paramilitary guerrillas in order to topple legitimate governments and establish brutal dictatorships, so what is your point here?
Also, various US governments, at several levels, have demonstrated over and over again that they don't fear armed civilians at all, e.g. the 1985 MOVE bombing [0]
I didn't read the GP comment as political, but using logic and referencing facts to support their point.
e.g.
> I will advocate for armed guards at schools to help dissuade would-be shooters from attempting anything. I would also advocate for the abolition of "Gun-Free Zones" as they only advertise to criminals that nobody is likely to be armed in these areas.
That seems logical to me. Who will adhere to Gun-Free Zones? Only law abiding citizens. The murderers will walk in there with a gun or a machete and do their thing knowing there won't be anyone equipped to effectively stop them.
Yes, the population at large will politicize these issues, but in the context of this discussion here on HN, why not try to be better and avoid politics as much as possible. Instead, discuss on the basis of logic and facts. I think HN in general, does this better than other online forums (e.g. Reddit). Not perfect of course, but better.
That you right off the bat accuse the GP of being political for expressing a viewpoint and supporting their arguments with logic and facts inhibits open discussion and ironically is a catalyst for politicization of the issue.
Proponents of firearms always seem to fall back on the same argument against a ban:
“Take the guns away and the bad guys will be the only people armed”.
This isn’t true though. Guns are used to shoot people because they are available, not because they are legal.
In the UK it is still possible to acquire guns illegally, but they are rare and difficult to come by. There were only 28 homicides from shootings last year.
If you just make it a lot more difficult to acquire a weapon the shootings disappear.
> Guns are used to shoot people because they are available, not because they are legal.
It's fairly easy for Italian citizens to obtain a gun (they need permits just like US), yet their mean death rate from mass shootings is one of the lowest, (lower than UK's) [1]
The problem with changing US gun culture is, right or wrong, the Second Amendment has been literally foundational to our history and culture.
If people disagree with the second Amendment, then it needs to revoked or changed. Until then, it's the law of the land. Changing the second Amendment won't happen. There isn't enough support for that in this country. A half-solution of restricting guns ties the hands of the good guys and empowers the bad guys.
> If people disagree with the second Amendment, then it needs to revoked or changed. Until then, it's the law of the land.
I own eight firearms, including a semi-auto centerfire rifle and autoloading shotgun. None of them would be banned under the original terms of the FAWB. My Second Amendment rights would perfectly intact if we brought it back, even if we omitted the grandfather clause.
I guess there's always a world where we bring it back and criminals 3D print high capacity mags for Model 740s but we have to start somewhere.
It's literally an argument about guns. The poster literally said pictures of dead kids wouldn't change their minds, and then made pro-gun comments.
On a thread that was supposed to be about how guns are so political that no one will ever change their minds.
That was my point. I don't care if they argued with logic.
They were making the point for op by just entirely skipping past the original argument (gun is political and no one is changing their minds) to talk about their stance on guns.
To me, politically encamped means that you have decided upon a viewpoint without much thought. You sway one way because it's the position of your "camp" or tribe. And because of that you won't change your mind.
"pictures of dead kids wouldn't change their minds" does not necessarily fit the definition of political encampment. If they won't change their mind because it would go against their party's line then they are being political. If they won't change their mind because they believe their stance is correct (based on logic, facts, morality, etc) and/or the other alternatives are wrong (based on logic, facts, morality, etc) then that is not political.
I guess your saw encampment in the GP's comment? I didn't.
It sounds like you've been reading NRA / gun lobby talking points quite carefully as you're hitting all the major bullet points.
>In fact, murder is illegal in this country, as is assault and brandishing firearms. These laws don't stop insane people from using weapons to murder people.
This is exactly the point. Ease of access to firearms for people who are unhinged is a problem. We aren't typically talking about criminals btw. We are talking about mass murderers. It is a very meaningful distinction.
Armed guards at elementary schools is insane. What about churches? Grocery stores? Music venues? Do we need heavily armed guards in every public place in society? This will heal our increasingly fractured society? Are militarized police forces (that are still scared to go in after active shooters) not enough for you?
>Researchers at JAMA Network Open found that of 133 incidents of K-12 school shootings from 1980 to 2019, 1 in 4 had an armed guard on scene. Moreover, researchers found the presence of armed guards failed to result in fewer casualties, instead noting a death rate 2.83 times greater in school shootings with armed personnel...
>the data suggest no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence in these cases. An armed officer on the scene was the number one factor associated with increased casualties after the perpetrators’ use of assault rifles or submachine guns. [1]
If the Government decides you are a threat, they will take you down. Some overweight Sunday warrior with an assault rifle is not going to save us from tyranny. The way you protect the country against that is to promote democracy and vote for people who aren't trying to overthrow the Government if they lose an election.
I would agree, but the evidence is that this isn't really true. Waco and Ruby ridge are examples of the government deciding someone was a threat and their guns allowed them to have considerable political impact. Yes, they were taken down, but their actions drastically weakened gun control in this country.
Individually? No. Collectively? Then I would say it does. Will it cost tons of lives? Yeah of course. But the US cannot bomb its own civilians into a functioning economy or obedient populous. The only force even remotely in a position the challenge the US military is the US population.
> Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.
I would (no sarcasm) love a link to any resources you know of that catalogue or chronicle the role of private arms in preserving liberal democracy. Big bonus if the resources are, or lean, academic.
Pretty sure they're talking about school shootings, which have been totally normalised in the USA, and arguably now as core a part of USAnian culture as apple pie or baseball.
School shootings in the USA have not been normalized at all. Our institutions and social degradation have caused these mass violence events. We've had an armed populace with very powerful guns for a long, long time. The elevated violence is not date coincident with more guns. Psychotropic drugs are though.
And contrary to conservative / pro-gun talking points, most mass shooters are not mentally ill nor are they on psychotropic drugs. It's a circular kind of logic, "they must be insane to want to shoot a bunch of innocent kids" so therefore they are mentally ill by definition.
That's not how mental illness works. By and large they are just sadistic nihilistic pieces of shit who want to live out violent fantasies for kicks before ending their garbage existence.
The overwhelming majority of mass shooters are urban career criminals either actively engaging in some kind of crime or getting in stupid disputes over perceived disrespect. These stories pretty much only show up in local if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage. The troubled white boy shooting up his school gets a lot of national press, because it fits a narrative the political elite wants to push, but those media darling cases are an absolutely tiny minority of mass shooting events.
Even if that was true, which is not, what kind of scientology BS is this? There is absolutely no proof that psychiatric meds push teens to commit mass shootings.
What evidentiary standard would that “proof” have to meet to satisfy you? Is there one? If not then you’re just expressing a political belief and not a scientific one.
Even if that was true, don’t you think it would be ironic if I just rather took the word of a random internet user at face value?
Regardless, some evidence to back up the claim should be easy to provide. There are plenty of legitimate medical journals with publicly available content online, and at least one should be carrying a study on psychiatric drugs contributing to violent and erratic behavior. There should be also some sociological papers out there outlining the relationship between psychiatric treatment and homicidal tendencies.
Yet nothing of these sorts has been provided, and here I am, being told that I don’t have “evidentiary standards” because I have asked for proof. The burden of which is on those who made the claim, by the way.
Why would I or anyone else make the effort of finding evidence for you when you’re not even willing to state the standard of evidence that you would accept? That sounds like a total waste of time since you’re effectively indicating that you have no objective standard and that you will reject any evidence that doesn’t satisfy your preconceived notions.
You’ve offered nothing but snark and evasion in response to a simple question asking what standard of evidence you’d accept. You’ve made it clear that there isn’t one an you’re acting in bad faith. Feel free to pretend that’s funny if you like, but it’s really just sad and rather dull.
> Regardless, some evidence to back up the claim should be easy to provide. There are plenty of legitimate medical journals with publicly available content online, and at least one should be carrying a study on psychiatric drugs contributing to violent and erratic behavior. There should be also some sociological papers out there outlining the relationship between psychiatric treatment and homicidal tendencies.
In short, some forms of publicly available, peer reviewed scientific studies, published in legitimate journals, relevant to the discipline.
And to clarify further, the funny bit here is that it is I who seems to be under scrutiny, not the one who made an unsubstantiated comment.
> The latter, the school boys, are nearly to a one on some kind of psychiatric drug.
This is easily verified with some simple searching[1].
And before you start on the “muh causality” deflection, observe that the verified claim says nothing about causality. We do know however that where there is causality there is correlation. So that is not proof, but it is evidence.
As for your claim about a lack of evidence for psychiatric drugs being associated with homicidal behavior, an RCT showing psychiatric drugs cause homicidal behavior, well that simply isn’t possible due to ethical restrictions. In fact any properly designed study showing a causal relation between some intervention and murder would be flagrantly immoral. Therefore, we're going to have to rely on a preponderance of evidence rather than the highest standards of scientific proof. And the evidence, such as it is, is stronger for the position that there is an association between psychiatric drugs and school boy murderers than that there isn't.
> And before you start on the “muh causality” deflection, observe that the verified claim says nothing about causality. We do know however that where there is causality there is correlation. So that is not proof, but it is evidence
This makes no sense whatsoever. Correlation doesn't imply causation, thus correlation by itself cannot be considered evidence of anything.
> And the evidence, such as it is, is stronger for the position that there is an association between psychiatric drugs and school boy murderers than that there isn't.
The website you just linked isn't even evidence of that.
It mentions 37 mass shooters, yes. But it doesn't provide an ounce of testable evidence about whether these people were actually using psychiatric drugs or not, and, for some of them, it cannot even name the supposed drug they were taking. And even if all of that was true, of over 1,000 personal-cause mass shootings since 1990, 37 is a drop in the bucket.
By the way, you have also lied by saying:
> As for your claim about a lack of evidence for psychiatric drugs being associated with homicidal behavior, an RCT showing psychiatric drugs cause homicidal behavior, well that simply isn’t possible due to ethical restrictions.
It took me a couple minutes to find a legitimate paper about this topic [0], something you could have done yourself if you weren't so set in dialectic buffoonery and intellectual dishonesty.
Let me know if my sources aren't up to your "standards", since you prefer to get your quotes from popular magazines. Perhaps you should try People next time.
> This makes no sense whatsoever. Correlation doesn't imply causation, thus correlation by itself cannot be considered evidence of anything.
Correlation is evidence that there may be causation and thus further investigation to find it might be fruitful. A lack of correlation is evidence that there is not causation. This isn't hard and it makes perfect sense.
> But it doesn't provide an ounce of testable evidence about whether these people were actually using psychiatric drugs or not
HIPPA forbids any such data collection for small cohorts. There aren't going to be medical sources, newspaper and similar accounts are the best we can get on whether or not a murderer in the relatively small class of school boy shooters is on psychiatric medications.
> It took me a couple minutes to find a legitimate paper about this topic [0]
I’m well aware that most mass shooters are just run of the mill thugs without any especial psychiatric pathology other than low sympathy for their victims, which isn’t something that we treat pharmaceutically.
Sadly, you have lost the thread. That includes the urban career criminals, who we are are very specifically not discussing. The topic is school boy murderers.
> something you could have done yourself if you weren't so set in dialectic buffoonery and intellectual dishonesty.
You're telling on yourself buddy.
> Let me know if my sources aren't up to your "standards", since you prefer to get your quotes from popular magazines. Perhaps you should try People next time.
Snark is one of the best indicators of an insecure midwit. Anyhow thanks for proving my point that you're discussing this entirely in bad faith. You may go now.
"It was in response to the concerns coming out of the Virginia ratification convention for the Constitution, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason, that a militia that was controlled solely by the federal government would not be there to protect the slave owners from an enslaved uprising. And ... James Madison crafted that language in order to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias — and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts. ... The Second Amendment really provided the cover, the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to be able to put down these uprisings"
All media has some sort of bias or agenda. This is pretty clearly an opinion piece, it isn’t as if they are hiding some secret anti-school-shooting agenda.
The biggest lie is whenever someone(s) claim to be "unbiased" or "neutral".
Not all agendas are created equal. Some positions on issues are obviously existential essential: economic inequality, pollution, climate change, legal system reform, policing reform, and healthcare costs. There are many other issues that are lower priority than existential threats that are debatable. And finally there are partisan cause célèbres that largely amount to bikeshedding. It's when those who benefit from espousing a particular issue position deny reality and legitimacy of an existential threat or suffering of a group makes them intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.
Junk food manufacturers depend on the addictive nature of the sugar and fat they cram into their products. I don't see how this is any different than cigarette warning labels.
Sometimes I buy sugar free corn flakes and although they should be cheaper theoretically, in reality they cost a multiple of the super sugary flakes. It would be great if we could get more products that aren’t sweetened when you buy them. Like corn flakes, cereal, bread, chocolate milk and lot of others.
This is a grocery store and grocery distribution consolidation/duopoly/monopoly problem, which is a separate issue than the food that is sold.
This is actually one reason I love FBA - I can buy all sorts of small brand specialty health foods from Amazon, bypassing what the local stores choose to stock (or, more often, not stock).
Amazon's anticompetitive practices mean this will become harder in the future however, as they will use this sales and pricing and customer data directly against any mom and pop product that becomes sufficiently successful.
We really need better protections for small businesses that sell via giant online platforms. There is no shortage of healthy, tasty food, people who want to sell it, or people who want to buy it.
Hehe, a while ago I embarked on a quest to find the lowest-added-sugar corn flakes.
6 or 7 supermarket chains further, sometimes a dozen products in same category, end result: not one (0) without added sugars. Anywhere. And all in a similar range, iirc.
So basically the same product everywhere. Just minor tweaks (or with/without chocolate, eg.) + packaging, brands & pricing differences.
Just goes to show how powerful food conglomerates destroy consumer choice.
I assume a lot of food is produced like toothpaste. I used to know a guy whose dad had a factory that produced toothpaste and shampoo for almost all big brands. They did R&D for them and just put slightly different recipes into the branded boxes. That means that a lot of shampoos and toothpaste (and probably) are basically only slight variations of the same thing.
Corn flakes and chocolate milk (I'm so confused by the mention of this) are junk food products made with sugar. It makes no sense to have them sugar free. As for cereal and bread, it should be trivially easy to find these without added sugar. I don't know where you live but I'm confident you can find these.
It's still compelled speech. It's possible that you think commercial communications are a special case, but I and many others do not, and find it just as reprehensible as any other form of compelled speech.
What other sorts of solutions are possible other than forcing people to put things on their packaging that they don't want there?
(1) it's not speech. (2) it's not political. (3) it is essential information for consumers that manufacturers have routinely lied about in the past. (4) it is already a compromise between what manufacturers would like and what 'the people' (you know, those pesky voters and their representatives) actually need. And finally (5) corporations already have outsized power, to carry their water to the point that you believe that documents a few hundred years old should be interpreted in the most literal way possible so that they can have even more power is not rational.
A ton of court decisions say it is in the US. Here is an article that cites a plethora of them [1]. Note: I have no idea who gfi.org is or whose agenda they are pushing or what side they are on. They just happened to have an article with a nice list of relevant cases.
Corporations are people, writing is speech and right is wrong. I actually don't care about what convoluted reasoning US courts use to reach their conclusions, they seem to be far more involved in seeing how they can kick the camel through the eye of the needle than with what was originally intended. Such incredibly narrow (and often narrowminded) views as well as all kinds of myopic rulings have done a lot of damage to the United States and to the world at large either by example or by osmosis.
So if you want to argue that being required to label the ingredients and other required prose on the outside of your packaging is 'speech' then you are effectively siding with the corporations against humanity. You can probably find some justification for that in your own mind but it isn't going to convince me that you have it right, no matter how many silly arguments you can find to back it up. There is such a thing as common sense and courts risk their own legacy as well as ridicule if they lose that very important element. And in the United States the supposedly independent supreme courts vote o n just about any subject that is even mildly politically tinted can be guessed with an accuracy that borders on certainty, something that should never ever happen if the court were independent.
This sort of reasoning is what got you 'the United States vs $50,000' and other elegant bits of bullshit. And don't get me started on the political nature of the US supreme court, which seems to be visible to all but a handful.
A significant amount of the article is about efforts to bring similar regulations to the US, and the likely challenges that will face, including a specific mention of the US approach to speech.
It is perfectly legal for compelled speech to exist in business activity, and is well within the interstate commerce clause.
As one of those evil American conservatives, I'm perfectly okay with targeted compelled speech in business activities, such as requiring marketing to be truthful.
But if they say nothing on the package, they're truthful, no? And it's more power to the FDA, a big government agency. Also, it's regulations. Those are bad for free markets, no? That's my understanding of the US culture (both liberals and conservative btw, I don't see meaningful difference between the two economically).
It's a very shallow understanding of US culture, but that's fair enough because CNN/Fox/MSM and other political outlets are a very shallow display of US culture.
Very few conservatives would be upset with the FDA being focused on "truth in packaging" as opposed to "FDA-approved" translating to "force employers/schools to force this on everyone" (aka experimental COVID shots).
Very few conservatives want to remove all regulation - many I know like the safety of the banking system as opposed the scam-heavy crypto market. However, we don't like over-zealous political enforcement of regulations (aka IRS doing targeted audits on conservative leaning institutions) or every transaction being reported to the government.
You are correct there isn't a meaningful economic difference between Democrats and Republicans right now. Both parties are letting inflation run rampant, have done little to fight taxes, deficits, or debts, and have no sense of financial responsibility to their taxpayers or voters, even though they both scream it when they are the minority party.
However, most Conservatives care about the federal debt/deficit, even if all the Republicans in the House don't. That's why Congress's approval rating is crap.
For drugs approved between 2011 and 2015 the FDA approval time was a median 303 days, faster than the EMA at 369 days.[1]
For drugs approved between 2000 and 2010 (for all 3 agencies, the FDA gets more applications) the FDA approval time was a median of 268 days, faster than the EMA at 356 days and Health Canada at 366 days.[2]
Based on your assertion and the data this means that you think all three of these agencies are harming the population, with the FDA being the lesser of all evils, by not approving drugs fast enough. Do you have a source for this claim?
It's still true, we still don't have them. Obama even passed a law about it and it didn't help.
> Based on your assertion and the data this means that you think all three of these agencies are harming the population, with the FDA being the lesser of all evils, by not approving drugs fast enough. Do you have a source for this claim?
This is obviously true. Are Americans, Canadians and Europeans all different species? No. Are all three countries slash political unions capable of running clinical trials? Yes. Do the FDA or Health Canada trust each other enough to allow things the other approved? No.
Although the FDA is sometimes surprisingly relaxed - here's a nootropics company selling drinks with at least two unapproved medications in them, adrafinil and omberacetam: https://www.trubrain.com/products/drinks.
Unless I'm missing something this is completely unrelated to and does not substantiate your argument that drug approvals are harming patients with the "mostly harming" argument implying more harm is being caused than prevented by current approval processes.
Once again, source?
> This is obviously true.
As you only mentioned the FDA, and keep only mentioning the FDA, it is not obviously true that you are arguing against all Western drug approval agencies and not specifically the FDA.
> Are Americans, Canadians and Europeans all different species?
All being the same species does not mean all have the same regulatory framework and in fact they don't. I am sorry but I really don't understand any of the points you're trying to make.
> Unless I'm missing something this is completely unrelated to and does not substantiate your argument that drug approvals are harming patients with the "mostly harming" argument implying more harm is being caused than prevented by current approval processes.
Not having sunscreen harms people by giving them skin cancer.
> As you only mentioned the FDA, and keep only mentioning the FDA, it is not obviously true that you are arguing against all Western drug approval agencies and not specifically the FDA.
I didn't say anything about them in my original post so I'm certainly open to believing they're also too slow.
Europeans certainly seem to believe a lot of strange things about American food that are just protectionism from their farmers.
> All being the same species does not mean all have the same regulatory framework and in fact they don't. I am sorry but I really don't understand any of the points you're trying to make.
Yeah but that's bad. It's also eg bad that every American city has completely different housing regulations.
I'm not sure how to communicate this more clearly. I'll try one last time.
My only question to you is this, you said:
"The FDA mostly harms the population by not approving drugs fast enough."
Do you have a source that says on the whole the FDA harms more people by not approving drugs more quickly, MORE than any safety added by this process.
Please note this would mean a citation that has looked at MANY approvals and timelines while ALSO looking at rejections for potential harm and concluding that the process is more harmful than beneficial.
To explain to you why yours is insufficient, even if we accept that this ONE example has caused harms you have not addressed any potential safety issues that have been prevented in OTHER therapeutics by the long process, this may in fact be zero or less than the harms caused by delays but requires evaluation in order to draw the conclusion you are making.
Taxes aren't an indicator of economic strength. If they pay more taxes they'll charge more in the bottom line which ends up being paid by the consumer anyway.
The headline suggests Musk is spiteful. This is disingenuous. If you read the actual letter it alleges Meta is illegally obtaining trade secrets and confidential documents retained by those employees to build the competing Twitter clone.
As if Meta would need anything they don't know already from running social networks at a scale that's one order of magnitude more complex than Twitter?
many books are given innocent sounding titles while pushing revisionist historical information or outright racist views. A book about Rosa Parks seems on its face to be a good thing. But if you inspect the contents you may find objectionable and false information, not conducive to the development of children.
What if there were 10 Rosa Parks books reviewed and were deemed fine, and that one was filled with false ideological nonsense?
Thank you. I haven't read the book, so I have no idea from which stance it views her life. It very well might be a racist book, and contain false information. Now I am going to have to read it, to make my own judgement.
Do the hard work and seek headaches. Don't quit learning and practicing until the headache resolves. That builds your value.