Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
Tragic events in Australia. Even more tragic: US gun nuts leaping on this to say “gun control does not work”. It is a precise echo of the refrain “vaccines don’t stop transmission”, as if anything other than 100% can be regarded as effectively zero. It is a tendency I’ve noticed particularly on the Right: the inability to grasp concepts of proportion. The Nirvana Fallacy.
A mirror of the argument is: “Good guys with guns don’t stop 100% of mass shootings, so ‘good guys with guns’ don’t work”. (In fact, they barely stop any).
Loss of life was reduced in the Bondi case by an unarmed Muslim…