Did the consensus shift about TikTok? I thought it was a given that as tech/IT people TikTok isn’t an app worth having on your phone due to spyware/attention brute forcing/curated propaganda by Chinese government.
There are people with a wide variety of opinions here. TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms, so naturally a lot of folk here will use it too.
And a thread about something on TikTok will naturally select participation from people who have first hand experience or care about it.
Well, I had it _becuase_ it was non-us propaganda. Otherwise all I have is US propaganda. If i must be manipulated, then let folks with competing objectives have an equal shot, hopefully they cancel each other out.
Now though? Tiktok isn't worth having, it is same old.
We recently dug out my portable cassette player (Not as small as a walkman, takes D cell batteries) so my daughter could listen to my wife's Disney cassettes from her childhood in the early 90s. I was amazed how a 5 year old immediately figured out how to manipulate the tape player and flip over cassettes etc. I suppose it was similar for me at the same age. We even found a NOS Disney cassette on eBay that my wife didn't have.
The funny thing is, even though I'm just about old enough to have bought a few chart music cassettes when they were a contemporary medium, I don't own any cassettes and I only had the player because I bought it on eBay to experiment with tape degradation for music.
But note that this is deeply unethical and amounts to denying people the right to self-defense, and by extension, denying people the right to freedom.
The only thing that happens when guns are denied is the rise of corrupt and totalitarian politicians, and that the common man is either oppressed by them or by criminal gangs. Enter guns, and the common man can defend himself against both, which is a blessing.
Thankfully it is now possible to print your own guns and build one easily, so this will become less of an issue in the future, when everyone, if they want, can carry concealed guns.
I live in a country with an aggressive gun lobby, and a ludicrously corrupt government that wants to create a fascist ethnostate. The gun nuts are largely on the side of the fascist ethnostate. I don’t think guns are the perfect defenders of freedom you think they are.
I like this response to poke a hole in the parent comment, but it is worth noting that smartphones and guns are different in a pretty massive way:
Smartphones can be useful and valuable in many ways separate from the ways they can be used harmfully. Guns exist only for physical violence (or to threaten physical violence).
This is a fairly recent transition in gun use - it's not that long ago that their primary use was in feeding people (both through hunting, and through keeping predators away from livestock/crops)
> In most times and places, I'd guess the military had many more guns than civilians
My understanding is that the mobilisation for the Civil War is the only time in US history that military stockpiles of firearms have outnumbered civilian gun ownership (although possibly also at the height of WWII).
Though large standing militaries (versus recruiting large numbers of civilians into militias) is a fairly recent phenomenon, so the calculation is often not as cut and dried as one might expect.
1. Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.
In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
2. Intense force or great power, as in natural phenomena.
A gunshot definitely feels like an intense force. You could argue it for a strike from a baseball bat but it's quite relative and of course you can strike gently much more easily than you can shoot gently.
> In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
The point of clay target shooting isn't to destroy something, it's to build a skill and test yourself against an impartial system. That's what Duck Hunt captures and what made it popular. It's why shooting is a sport in the olympics.
Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
> Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
I'm not debating that. I have no moral issue with shooting a clay duck, I just see using explosives to shoot anything as an act of violence. I would say the same about fishing and archery. There seems to be some confusion here about the moral aspect of this, I'm not saying it's anti-social or anything like that, only that the use of guns is inherently violent.
All tools have potential use for violence. Hammers are as good at smashing heads as building houses. Even nuclear weapons have been used for constructive purposes. No tool is inherently good or evil, safe or violent. Those are properties of verbs. Everything is in the application and choices of the user.
Blaming a tool does seem like a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility.
Again I'm not making a moral argument here. I'm not talking about good and evil. I'm talking about violence and non-violence. A gun being used for "a good purpose" doesn't make it less violent.
So to you a flare gun is violent? It's a gun. Takes 12ga cartridges / shells. It can certainly be used to kill someone, but is designed and intended for saving lives. Is a knife violent? How about a letter opener? What about rope? Does it become violent only when certain knots are tied in it? How does this violent / non-violent object dichotomy work for you?
Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically, with just about any object since the discovery of the rock and pointy stick.
> Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically
That's fine, I already shared several dictionary definitions which differ from what it is "to you." To answer your questions above I would refer you again to those definitions.
I see no answer in your comments to my question about the knife / letter opener dichotomy, or about when a rope becomes violent or not. That's why I asked a direct question about your system of thought, your perceptions. They are common tools, they should be easy answers.
In the system of thought I've expressed, this is easy: all are tools, all have potential violent and non-violent uses. Depends on the intention and choices of the user.
In the system of thought you've expressed, I'm asking about these specific objects, because the words you've provided aren't sufficient for me to tell if they are violent objects or not. I'd like to know how it works for you. How you perceive it. If you're referencing a previous comment could you quote it? I'd like to understand what you're trying to say.
Sure. Would you usually describe a letter as having been "violently opened?" The regular magnet of using a letter opener doesn't involve violence, even while the object itself has the potential for a violent use.
But a loaded gun can only be fired violently. A clay duck can't explode non-violently when struck by a bullet. Nothing can be struck by a bullet without violence.
> The regular magnet of using a letter opener doesn't involve violence, even while the object itself has the potential for a violent use.
This sounds like you agree with my assessment, that violence is not inherent to the object, but a function of it's user's intent.
> But a loaded gun can only be fired violently. A clay duck can't explode non-violently when struck by a bullet. Nothing can be struck by a bullet without violence.
And yet you're back to assigning violence as an inherent property of an object here. Seems you are using two different and opposing systems of thought simultaneously.
Sometimes in my area of the US, people will fire guns into the air in reverie. Which most people would not describe as violent. Rather, celebratory. Rescue flares don't strike me as violent, but are fired from guns. Spin launch's projectile is another great example of something fired from a gun without violence.
On the other hand, if a person stood in the path of any of those while firing, the results could be quite gruesome, energetic even. But I wouldn't describe them as violent unless there was associated ill intent. Accidents are not typically described as violent.
You seem to be making some sort of qualitative argument about weapons (bullets, arrows... fishing rods?) vs non-weapons (baseballs), but I'm not seeing what makes archery categorically different from, say, playing darts, or shot-put (in all cases, a sport involving rapidly accelerating a projectile towards a goal of some kind)
No, not about weapons, about effects. Fishing is violent because it harms fish, not because a fishing rod is categorised as a weapon. I don't think archery is categorically different than darts. Shot-put is somewhat different in that nothing need be damaged in performing it but you're right that the launching of the projectile could be seen as violent. The former two meet both definitions of violence whereas the latter meets only one. The thing with a gun is that any use of them involves violence of multiple kinds.
That's funny because one of the reasons I used Telegram originally was the encryption of messages and open sourcedness. Also Whatsapp use to require your phone to be on and with signal to receive messages on the web app.
I used to order fragrance samples on eBay, The first order I received from them had a 10 1/2 pence stamp attached. I was perplexed as the half pence (ha'penny, pronounced HAPE-KNEE) coin had been discontinued in 1984, 30 years ago at the time, and I'd only seen them in an old collection of coins from my parents. Also the portrait of the Queen (I'm from the UK) was a bit outdated.
I contacted the seller and it turned out her husband was a stamp collector and gave her his low value cast-offs to use as postage. I found it amazing that 30+ year old stamps were still valid. It's only recently they've become invalid postage as now stamps require a barcode.
Also I used to get items delivered to my office, and the office manager's husband was a stamp collector, so she used to ask to keep the stamps I got (I used to order electronic components from all over the world) so this completed the philatelist cycle.
Another old currency anecdote. I used to work on the checkouts at a supermarket in Cambridge circa 2009 and at least two times we'd get visiting academics from the USA who had studied in the UK years before and they'd try to pay with currency they'd had from the time, except it was the awesome old pre-decimal money (We switched to decimal in 1971). I found it quaint that they thought it was still valid and thought to bring it with them.
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