Los Angeles police reportedly shot and injured two women delivering newspapers by accident …

How the fuck does one accidentally deliver newspapers????

Oh, wait … I know this one.

The same way one shoots an elephant in one’s pajamas!

(I can haz Internet winz now?)

An armed society is a polite society because multiple imaginary universes can be wished into existence.

I’m trying to remember where that line comes from. I can’t remember the specific book but it definitely sounds like Heinlein. Starship Troopers perhaps?

That fellow on the TV to head the CIA sure was polite and has a wonderful family life too.

Computer ate a comment I had written, the jist being is this madman cop suffering from PTSD after being trained to kill without guilt and honing his skills in Iraq ?

I can’t remember any (non-juvenile) Heinlein book where he didn’t drag that old chestnut out.

An armed society is a shy society.

http://youtu.be/u9mw80FhMtg

I am not sure I understand what your point is supposed to be. If you are suggesting that the police should be disarmed, demilitarized, and that the federal government should stop brainwashing them with a constant stream of paranoid delusions, then I agree whole-heartedly.

If on the other hand you are suggesting that private citizens should not be able to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed natural human right to keep and bear whatever arms they like, then I would kindly suggest that you stop–since 1) it is annoying, and 2) it is driving the price of all the best armaments and accessories through the roof–because now fearful, law-abiding citizens are running out and snatching up every gun off the shelves possible as soon as they come in stock.

Hmmm. I haven’t read Heinlein in perhaps forty years. I only vaguely remember most of them. My brother was a much bigger fan.

Yeah Attaturk! You’re preventing responsible citizens who wanna pack heat in bars, churches, schools and hospitals from exercising their god given® rights for a reasonable price. What are you? Some kinda (annoying) Kenyan, socialist, communist, fascist? Now you had better just stop exercising your right to speak freely because you’re annoying the gun nuts and trampling upon their rights to keep and bear arms. Because freedom!

Alot of good folks believe that right is guaranteed for a well-armed
militia….who all does that mean? And I am not feeling any safer when I
think anyone I meet may be armed. What have we become?

Good morning. I thought he was being snarky.

Thanks for the post Attaturk.

Good morning, pups. Today we have Brooks, Cohen and Krugman. In “Florence and the Drones” Bobo thinks that as we debate the ethics of using drones, it might be surprisingly useful to take a page out of Machiavelli’s tough-minded view of human nature. I think Mr. Cohen has filched one of MoDo’s pieces. In “A ‘Son of Hell,’ Reconsidered” he yowls that we need our villains in all their scheming iniquity, and that Richard III is unsuited to rehabilitation. He’s obviously never heard of Titulus Regius… Prof. Krugman, in “Kick That Can,” says given the state we’re in, now is not the time for spending cuts. Again, the voice crying in the wilderness…

Here they are, and

here’s Krugman’s blog.

The coffee, tea and hot chocolate are ready, and I’ve got waffles with warm maple syrup today. I can see we may be headed down the road of another bout of hysteria from people who howl that Obama (everything is his fault, you know…) is trying to take their guns away. Not my cup of tea at all. Speaking of a cup of tea… Have a great day.

If he was then it’s too early for me to recognize snark. Sorry.

You’d be incorrect. The civilian society in Starship Troopers, for one example, went unarmed and on the other paw his young adult stuff often had frontier-like settings where being armed was regarded as necessary.

Now often his protagonists went armed for one plot reason or the other even if the general population did not… but that’s hardly something that was peculiar to Heinlein.

Heinlein was actually fairly moderate in his libertarian views in comparison to the rabid winger mishmash you find nowadays.

For one example: he believed that government served a purpose.

It is very difficult to believe that an organization, with as stellar a reputation as the LAPD of, ya know, protecting and serving all their citizens could possibly shoot the wrong person.

I can see the op-eds a few years from now after a second round of deep recession. They’ll all be saying things like “Austerity made everything worse! Why didn’t anybody catch that before the spending cuts?”.

Now that’s snark.

My response: A polite society doesn’t NEED to be armed.

Boxturtle (In THIS society, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have artillery)

I’m not sure I’m right. That’s just how I read it.

And I am not feeling any safer

Perhaps if we had a couple executions and a few hundred deportations, you’d feel safer?

Boxturtle (What? That didn’t work either?!? Maybe if your local police had drones…)

I didn’t know getting out your gun, aiming it at someone and pulling the trigger could be called “an accident.” The media is such crap. Why didn’t they say “alleged accident” since that’s what they usually write, but then that’s is a smidge more accurate and they can’t have that.

I certainly was not sure myself…Good Morning.

Oh, unless the gun was pink and the perp thought it was a toy.

I’m still a fan. Heinlein wrote to and for an audience of nerds like me, and told them what they needed to hear to keep buying his books. There’s a lot of accidental good advice for nerd living in Heinlein (starting with the categorical imperative, “Rub her feet”). There’s a lot of good and not-so-good and also tedious fantasy, too. But it’s essentially fiction, written to entertain nerds, make mortgage payments and buy station wagons full of groceries.

I got my money’s worth. And that’s all RAH really wanted.

Good morning. I’ll bet your Police Chief is missing his old gig as the head of CHP South. What with all the “Man Hunt” and free fire shootin and free flowin Homeland Defense dollars and all. Why, it’s enough to get even the most hardened Authoritarian a little excited.

And don’t you feel really alot safer? If the bad guys don’t get you, the
police probably will. While I was married, I always said it’s a good thing
that there was no gun in the house….;)

Thanks, attaturk, what is polite is taking hostages, then we’re all at a safe place.

Yecch, Heinlein. Fancied himself an apostle for militarism after a peacetime stint in the Navy. Wrote himself into his fiction and surrounded himself with imaginary Ph.D.-educated sex bombs. Wrote a book with the worst example of a deus ex machina I can think of. Invented the hideous neologism “grok”, which manages to be even clumsier and uglier than Larry Niven’s “tanj”. Thumbs down.

Oops, this is in reply too monoceros4 who said:

“Fancied himself an apostle for militarism…”

Actually, pretty much not.

“Wrote himself into his fiction and surrounded himself with imaginary Ph.D.-educated sex bombs”

Ah, that would be Virginia Heinlein. Quite not imaginary.

“Wrote a book with the worst example of a deus ex machina I can think of.”

Hey, it was God… what did you expect him not to do?

Invented the hideous neologism “grok”

… a made-up word supposedly describing a philosophical concept from the language of an utterly nonhuman species? Or are you just ticked off when fans use it at conventions?

Stony. “Rub her feet.”
Lazarus Long absolutely spoke truth on that one.
Words to live by. Happy wife, happy life

Aren’t the spouse and kids of an abuser “polite” to the abuser.

I think of being polite as an act of kindness and comradery with other people.

The being “polite” to a threat is not the same thing.

their Constitutionally guaranteed natural human right to keep and bear whatever arms they like

There is nothing natural nor universal nor a human right about the right to bear arms. The continued insistence on this shibboleth makes US citizens appear as irrational psychopathic nuts, who like the killing that results from the armed society.

In the wake of the manhunt for a former LAPD officer who went on a rampage yesterday, we see how the “armed society” has worked its magic.

Please tell me again what pending legislation stands to remove these assault weapon death machines that only belong on the battlefield from the hands of the LAPD. Because so far, outside of a handful of maladjusted loons the only other people I see going bugshit with these weapons are cops. You know, the ones us uncivilized firearms owners are expected to solely trust with our protection and safety even if we’re from subsets of the population they typically either don’t care about or actively hate.

Oh and I suppose that it would be churlish of me to point out that this kind of disproportionate response and the firepower brought to bear with it is a direct outgrowth of this hyperbolic “America is a war zone because of all these evil assault weapons” talk. But I’m going to do it anyway.

The Heinlein quote is from Beyond This Horizon (Astounding SF, 1942). Wingnuts would be aghast at the other points it makes. For example, the book speaks admiringly (and the plot centers around) a government that controls the genetics of the population, to the point of sterilizing and even killing individuals who have genes that officials don’t like. Another important point is that when you die, you are immediately reincarnated in a fetus that’s about to be born. At the climax, a high official who has guided the development of a “superman” strain arranges to die such that she is reincarnated in the best product of that line.

In the course of the book, an armed revolt by citizens dissatisfied with the government is casually and effortlessly put down, with 100% fatalities for the revolutionaries.