I think a lot about the phrase "a well armed society is a polite society" because it's implicitly premised on this kind of "freedom as domination" that everyone will be polite to you otherwise you shoot them
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Also reminds me of that bit in AC Shadows where Luis Frois is like “Japanese children are so much less rowdy than Portuguese ones!” and Naoe goes “yeah they have knives so the rowdy ones tend to get stabbed :D” and Frois is like “oh…”
aug 28, 2025, 1:03 pm • 1 0 • view
Also like American society is not polite lmfao
aug 28, 2025, 7:50 pm • 6 0 • view
i think the expectation is that more guns would make it polite
aug 28, 2025, 7:50 pm • 5 0 • view
at some point if there are no more alive people it technically counts as polite
aug 28, 2025, 7:54 pm • 1 0 • view
Explicitly yes, this was the justification used in my house when I was a child. This isn’t a case of the gunners NOT understanding the thought process they employ, though it is usually framed as “If you are not polite, someone might shoot you” which implicitly opens space between them and violence.
aug 28, 2025, 1:18 pm • 2 0 • view
You can - and I do -take a reading of this which implies a discomfort with being an agent of violence simultaneous with an acceptance of the legitimacy of violence against the disruptive, usually outsiders but occasionally as self discipline against assholes.
aug 28, 2025, 1:22 pm • 1 0 • view
And of course the outsider or the stranger has less recourse to violence than does anyone with stronger local ties. That's also true for appeals to legal authorities, but in theory the legal authorities are supposed to be designed to counter that problem.
aug 28, 2025, 7:10 am • 10 0 • view
Only 18% of Americans believe in good guys shooting bad guys. Can we start there‽
aug 28, 2025, 6:05 am • 5 0 • view
Trump cut all funding for the safer communities LE measures that were grants from the Biden Harris administration. He said he wants to use “power.“ Power won’t stop this. His cult doesn’t realize that he’s the one who said “first you take the guns.” www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana...
aug 28, 2025, 1:23 pm • 0 0 • view
A well armed society is a hostage situation
aug 28, 2025, 6:31 am • 18 2 • view
If you need to duel to defend your honor, you have none. If you need the constant threat of bodily harm to be kind, you are not kind.
aug 28, 2025, 1:49 pm • 9 0 • view
And also that people can’t be polite without that threat!
aug 28, 2025, 11:55 am • 15 0 • view
An AI come up with a .357 caliber thesaurus? Cus these yokels need some sort of a bok bok to learn..
aug 28, 2025, 11:11 am • 0 0 • view
Which is to say, a well-armed society is a scared and brittle society … … yeah that checks out
aug 28, 2025, 8:47 am • 6 0 • view
It’s also funny b/c 80% of law enforcement in the Frontier West was disarming everyone when they came into town for this exact reason.
aug 28, 2025, 12:53 pm • 5 2 • view
In reality that kind of armed society actually ends up like those videos of insane road rage drivers opening firing on someone for cutting them off
aug 28, 2025, 5:45 am • 112 6 • view
Pretty sure there's a video of one of those road rage shootings, in iirc Florida, where both of the drivers had guns and started blasting while driving
aug 28, 2025, 5:46 am • 82 3 • view
So, effectively, a significantly more trashy version (no small feat) of Antebellum South society
aug 28, 2025, 5:48 am • 17 0 • view
aug 28, 2025, 7:51 am • 4 0 • view
I think you mean this guy. youtu.be/saQ72NZtrS0?...
aug 28, 2025, 9:21 am • 2 0 • view
As a reactionary teen, and a fan of Heinlein, I said that to my dad in the 80s. He replied “An armed society is Afghanistan.” We’ve switched places since then but that’s another story.
aug 28, 2025, 3:20 pm • 5 1 • view
Speaking of “polite societies” bsky.app/profile/diew...
aug 28, 2025, 11:39 am • 1 0 • view
Unfortunately in America I feel like I kind of agree with the phrase, considering the only way to bring the reactionary movement to heel is by speaking the only language they understand
aug 28, 2025, 11:41 am • 0 0 • view