Yet, the California courts apparently disagree with you. Weird.

But buying an island doesn’t solve his issue. Shipwreck survivors would still legally be allowed to wash up on his island’s beaches!

Valid points that, unfortunately, do nothing to change gun nut’s minds. Because, when you come down to it, they are all occupying the same shared fantasy where they and others like them are the heroes that society simply won’t allow to exist. They’re the X-Men, and we’re all the anti-mutant politicians who are…

Not to mention that an easement (de facto taking?) was established in the 19020s long before the law was written. Since both of these were in place well before he bought the property, he just didn’t do enough due diligence before buying the property. He can buy my rights portion of the easement for $20.

The idea the that public/sovereign government owns navigable waterways and beachfront at the intersection with the ocean is of ancient lineage, and you can find antecedents of the California Coastal Act going back to the Romans.

He’s too poor to own an island.

Truly he is the pleb.

And to stop pushing me stories I already said I wasn’t interested in.

I want them to bring back the ability to swipe away stories from the news feed. I wish that was in an update.

I think the paranoid fantasy of a military take over of the country with only armed guerilla fighters left to fight back (like Red Dawn but it’s not the USSR but the American government that takes over small towns) runs strong thanks to constant claims of an impending “government takeover” on conservative media.

I think it is established at this point that the group most likely to elect authoritarians is the group most vocally worried about authoritarians.

Counterpoint: an educated, trained, citizenry actually can be effective to counter oppression:

The 2nd only exists because the then-new government of the USA was worried that England would try and invade again.

But the technological discrepancy is comically large at this point. John Q. Public’s assault rifle is going to do a lot of damage to a predator drone

Disagree. There is one fundamental and irrefutable argument for everyone to own a gun. The secret werewolf army that is amassing underground. I propose a mandatory revolver and bandolier of silver bullets funded by the government be provided for every household.

Sure, but every argument against gun control is idiotic.  We’re arguing with idiots.  And every point needs to be refuted backwards, forwards, and sideways.

This is only tangentially related to the subject but I’ve been talking about gun control a lot today and I really want to address one of the main arguments for the second amendment: it is to protect us from an oppressive government.

Playing the blame game is simple. As a white male, former catholic, former GOP voter, I can say that I drank the conservative kool aid for years. Introspection, questioning assumptions, testing facts and most importantly, listening helped me see the error in my ways. Growing up with and being surrounded by hard-line…

As a firmly anti Trump white person, I have to insist that while all racists voted for Trump, not all Trump voters are racists

Isn’t it funny that we can never talk about this for fear of offending those very white people? When the crime rate was sky high, the media and white people couldn’t stop talking about the pathology of blackness that they believed caused that crime spike. I wonder why white people are so fragile and cannot look at the…

It might be theater - at least in part - but that’s a lot of what politics has become. Trump won* in part because of the way he played emotional theater, and for better or worse many of the key political debates in the US revolve around theatrics.