Race (Response Is Not Mandatory: Fill & Download for Free

All in all, no complaints. He reacted relatively well, he funneled money into the right businesses, and our healthcare system is about provinces helping provinces, and the government helping provinces, rather than the US version of “Government vs States”.I will say a couple of things he could have done better, but also maybe I don’t understand it from a logistical point of view.Cancellation of Flights from Hot ZonesI was clamoring for banning flights from hot zones, and at the time, the virus was flaring up in Italy, China, Egypt and Iran. Trudeau still hadn’t banned any flights from there, and I fear he was going to think he would be called a “racist” for doing so. Cases of national health should not be viewed as “race based”. Treating Chinese-Canadians, or Italian-Canadians on a broad spectrum as “dirty” and “blaming the disease on them” is racist, and we stand against that. Putting a travel ban on incoming and outgoing flights to hot zones is not racist. It’s common sense.What I think would have been fair for Trudeau to do is say to all Canadian citizens that they have two weeks to get their affairs together, and they will be sending flights. By the end of a specified time, they’re on their own. Expats who wanted to return to Canada could do so. Trudeau eventually did do this, but I feel it was too late down the line.Mandatory QuarantineThis one really razzed me. Trudeau went from “recommended” to “required” but never said mandatory until people really started calling him out. I thought it was ridiculous he continued to say it was “required” and not “mandatory”.He eventually did make it mandatory, but looking back now I kind of understand. A mandatory quarantine is enforceable by law, and he had to make sure it didn’t violate anything in the charter of rights and freedoms etc. The day he was asked the question and just kind of…stood there and stared at the camera, I was furious. He made it mandatory the next day, so it’s fine.OverallOverall, I can’t complain. Canada is recording under 300 cases Canada-wide every day, and under 200 for Ontario. The resilience of the nurses and doctors, and everyone doing their part shows that Canada is not only one of the most polite countries around, but we take pandemics seriously. There will always be a few bad apples and a few dummies, but overall, we did things pretty well.Oh - and a message to our American friends coming over to visit:You are more than welcome. But you follow OUR rules, not yours. You quarantine for 14 days and you do NOT go to grocery stores, shopping centers, or the beach. We are doing our best to crush the curve, and we don’t care about your feelings. You come here, you quarantine. If you don’t want to, expect a hefty fine (and in my opinion, a travel ban for a year).

Here’s a great (and common) example of Equivocation, Cherry Picking, and the False Analogy:Seems reasonable, right?The problem is that every one of these lines hides critical dissimilarities that make the respective comparisons invalid.Title at Each Point of SaleOK, but for a car, the title exists primarily to ensure documentary proof of ownership in case of a dispute, since cars are the second most valuable piece of property most people are likely to own.It is perfectly legal in every State I’m aware of to sell a car without formally transferring the title—it’s just usually a bad idea for the buyer, and may impede their ability to get the vehicle registered for travel on public ways. But if my buddy has an old, beat-up pickup, and I want to buy it just to use on my farm (not on public roads), there is no law (again, in any State I’m aware of) that prevents me from just handing him $1,000 cash and receiving the keys.The ability to track a car owner by the title is purely incidental, and proving that a car is deeded in X’s name is not sufficient to hold X responsible for whatever happens with it.For a gun, the suggestion made by gun control proponents is that it ought to be illegal to transfer a gun without documenting the transfer, and the primary reason is not to forestall disputes over the lawful ownership of the gun (which may only be worth a few hundred dollars), but to enable government tracking of who owns what guns and where.Tag at Each Point of SaleFor a car, the “tag” (i.e., license plate) is required only to drive on public roads,* and serves as a visible identifier of the vehicle for purposes of traffic enforcement. It has nothing to do with forensic investigations of vehicular felonies—though it is often incidentally useful for that purpose.Also, again, it is perfectly legal to sell a car without “tags”—it just can’t be driven on public streets. But that busted, old pickup? I can buy it without plates, never put any plates on it, and it will still be legal.*[Ever wonder why NASCAR cars have no plates? Because they’re not ever going to drive on public ways, so they don’t need them.]There is simply no equivalent for a gun. A per-gun “gun license” would apply even to guns kept entirely on private property, would not serve as a visible identifier of a gun in use, would exist solely for the purpose of investigating crimes (a purpose for which it is nearly useless—most States with gun registries are able to use them to meaningful advantage in criminal investigations only once or twice a year), and would be legally mandated for every transfer.TrainingFirst—and I’ll keep coming back to this—a driver’s license is only required at all to drive on public roads. But an unlicensed 14-year-old can race Formula 1 racers all day long.Second, in most States, formal training of any sort is not required for licensure, as long as you pass the test. Driver’s Ed is helpful—but it’s not mandatory.Third, Driver’s Ed doesn’t actually teach you to be a good driver. It teaches you how to operate a car in conformance to the laws of the road.So, “gun training like driver training” would be optional, and would not actually focus on shooting skill but on how to carry lawfully in public (e.g., “don’t brandish”, “here are the lawful modes of carry”, etc.).But what the gun control proponents want is more like, “Minimum X hours of mandatory range time with a certified instructor (of which we will make sure there are very few). Or else you can’t have a gun.”Written TestOK, this is the one line where there’s a valid comparison. We could have a written test on gun laws the way we do on rules of the road.The only problem is that the written test for a driver’s license is already bullshit.It requires you to memorize obscure aspects of traffic law that you will certainly forget within a year (e.g., hand signals, identifying obscure road signs by shape alone), and gives you an “incorrect” result if you give an answer that is more strict than the actual law (e.g., if you answer that legal BAC is 0.05 rather than 0.08… because you might kill someone by being too sober, right?).It’s not a test of whether you know enough to be a safe driver—it’s a test of whether you studied the guide well enough to jump through the desired hoops.I have no doubt that any written gun licensure test would be the same—questions like, “What is the minimum legal barrel length of a gun with a shoulder stock and rifled barrel?” (And oh, by the way, you fail if you say 16″ rather than “Any length, as long as you have an NFA tax stamp.”)It would serve no legitimate purpose—but then, neither do most of the questions on the written driver’s test.Practical TestAgain, for cars, this is only required for a license to drive on public roads.Further, it tests only your ability to operate within the rules of the road—not your skill at driving.Things like, “Merge onto the highway, using proper signaling,” not “Cross four lanes of highway traffic at 70 mph before you miss your exit a quarter-mile ahead, then take the hairpin exit, all without harming the cake you’re transporting in the back seat.”You can be a bad driver and still get a license, as long as the State is reasonably confident you won’t cause a major crash.So, a direct equivalent for guns would be, “Are you capable of carrying this gun in public without shooting anyone? Are you capable of drawing and re-holstering the gun without shooting anyone including yourself? Are you capable of loading, unloading, and clearing the chamber? OK, cool, you pass.”And if you fail, you still get your gun, but can’t carry it in public (until you retake the test next month).But what gun control proponents want is more like, “Can you field strip and reassemble this firearm? Can you shoot to within X degree of accuracy (where X is 50% stricter than the graduation requirements at the police academy)? Can you pass a MiB-style shoot-or-no-shoot drill? No? Sorry, no gun for you.”(Yes, I’m exaggerating—but the point is the difference between “bare minimum competence under everyday circumstances” versus “high degree of competence in uncommon scenarios”.)Health RequirementsUhh… yeah. There are, I suppose, “health requirements” for a driver’s license.Things like, “Can you see?” or “Do you have untreated narcolepsy?” or “Do you have functional arms?”Basically variants on, “Are you physically capable of driving, and if you drive a car, will you wrap it around a damn tree due to health complications?”What they don’t do is say, “You need a mandatory mental health evaluation, and if we find you may be prone to road rage, vehicular suicide, emotional driving, or voting Republican, then no license for you.”There’s really no equivalent for guns.A person who is physically incapable of using a gun isn’t going to buy one, but isn’t any particular threat if they do, and there are no major medical disorders that would cause someone to be inherently unsafe with a gun (no, not even grand mal seizures—because the odds of having a seizure in the moment that you’re holding a gun with a finger inside the trigger guard are infinitesimal).What gun control proponents want is the ability to disqualify gun buyers for mental health issues short of a judicial determination of incompetence. And when you listen to the actual list of things they think should be disqualifying, it becomes quite apparent that it would serve as a plausible pretext to deny anyone that the permitting authority wishes to deny. (I have even encountered one or two who will outright and unironically state that they believe the desire to own a gun for any purpose other than hunting is evidence of a mental disorder.)Liability InsuranceCar insurance is, again, only mandatory to register a vehicle to drive on public roads.Further, the insurance covers accidents, and sometimes negligent misconduct by the insured, and it is priced based on many factors including the overall likelihood of an insured event and the individual risk factors of the insured.It does not cover damages caused to third parties by a car thief (except possibly in the act of theft), deliberate criminal conduct by the insured, or acts of gross negligence. It most certainly does not cover suicides.It also has coverage limits—sure, a car accident might be capable of causing a 10-car pileup totaling $2 million in damages, but that doesn’t mean you have to carry a $2 million policy.What gun control proponents want for “gun insurance” is a policy that would be required to cover all harm caused by the gun (including if it’s stolen and someone else uses it to commit murder), with minimum coverage calibrated to cover at least the value of a wrongful death suit, and with premiums priced to “force gun owners to internalize the true cost of gun violence” (i.e., make them responsible not only for their own risk, but for all the gun crime in the country as well, and gun suicides to boot).What would actually be analogous to car insurance (ignoring the “only in public” thing) would be, honestly, a policy that would have premiums so low that no insurer would bother—because there are only roughly 500 fatal gun accidents per year and roughly 19,000 nonfatal accidental shootings (out of well over 100 million gun owners… and we don’t know that all those accidents are even with legal guns), so the actuarial risk that any given covered gun owner would be responsible for a covered accident would be trivial.Remember—the goal of insurance pricing is to ensure that the amount paid in premiums is higher than the amount paid out, over a given time period, but not too much higher, because the premiums also need to seem fair to the client.So, if we say the average wrongful death payout is ~$1 million (that’s probably a bit high) and the average cost of a nonfatal gunshot injury is ~$150,000[1] then a hypothetical insurer who insures every gun owner would pay out ~$2.8 billion per year (if we assume every gun accident is attributable to a legally-owned gun—which is, of course, not true).Spreading that out across even a bare 100 million gun owners would yield a $28.00 per year premium (say, $35/year to account for profit)… with discounts after X years without a claim and so forth, just like car insurance.And because the risk either does not increase with number of guns owned, or increases by a factor far less than 1x per gun (we can remain agnostic on the details for these purposes), it wouldn’t be $35 per year per gun but closer to a flat $35 per year.This means that even a “high risk” policy (e.g., child in the home, no gun safe) wouldn’t likely go above $100 per year. Semiautomatic rifles, incidentally, would qualify for lower premiums, since most gun accidents occur with handguns, shotguns, and bolt-action “hunting rifles”.Periodic RenewalsA driver’s license renewal is a purely bureaucratic process, intended simply to ensure that the photo and identifying information remain current. You do not (at least in the absence of very advanced age or significant health issues) need to requalify each time you renew.Additionally, these requirements are at least in part because a driver’s license has taken on a role as a primary photo-ID, even though that is not its original purpose. (For instance, were it not used as ID, there would be little reason for a driver’s license alone to contain address information.)There is no equivalent need for a gun license (assuming one is required at all). It would not be a primary photo-ID for more than a negligible subset of gun owners, so there would be little reason to have frequent renewals. If a renewal were required (say, every 10 years), there would be no justifiable reason not to do it by mail.Periodic InspectionsAn annual car inspection is intended to ensure that emissions levels are within legal parameters and that the car is at least minimally road-worthy. That is, it’s an inspection for mechanical safety and to curb pollution.It is also done at a service station, by a private mechanic whose only interest is in whether or not it passes the specific tests he is legally instructed to run. No government agent comes to your home garage and checks whether it is properly ventilated or how you store your gas can, nor does he get to “keep an eye out” during the tests for any incidental legal violations of things other than the safety and emissions standards (e.g., after-market window tints, disabled seatbelt alarm, etc.).Further, if you fail the inspection, you just can’t drive the car on public ways until you fix the problem and pass an inspection. Your car is not confiscated, nor is your license revoked.There is no equivalent for guns.Guns do not produce ambient pollution when used, they remain mechanically sound for decades unless significantly abused, and accidental injuries due to mechanical failure of firearms are very nearly unheard-of in the modern era.The “inspections” generally urged by gun control proponents are UK-style inspections of the gun owner’s home to ensure “safe storage”, and are aimed at finding potential criminal violations, not mechanical deficiencies in the firearm.And if you fail an inspection, they want to take your guns away—possibly including your right to own any more guns for the rest of your life (since you’d then be guilty of a criminal firearms offense…).Of course, there’s also the incompleteness of the comparison, highlighting only the aspects that the proponents want to focus on.If guns were actually regulated like cars…I could walk into the dealership, pay cash, and leave with a new gun 30 minutes later.Even if I had no license, I could get it delivered to my home, even across State lines.I could own a gun as a convicted felon.Even if I had lost my gun rights for actual gun crimes, I could get a “Cinderella license” to allow me to carry guns under limited criteria for occupational purposes.My right to carry a gun in one State would be valid in all 50 States and D.C.I could own a gun at any age and carry one in public starting at age 16 in most States.I could modify my gun any way I want, without permission from anyone and without notifying anyone.Even if the mods made it no longer public-carry-legal [road-legal], I could still keep and use it on my own property (or the private property of any willing third party).Technical violations of gun laws that haven’t actually harmed anyone (e.g., improper transport, improper storage, carrying in a school zone, “printing” while carrying concealed) would be mere civil infractions punishable by a low-cost ticket.I wouldn’t need a tax stamp to own a muffler… or even to own a “silent running” electric car.[OK, I admit, this last comparison is itself fallacious—I threw it in just for snark.]This isn’t about whether gun control is good or bad.This isn’t about whether it should or shouldn’t be easier to get a gun than a car (but FYI, it definitely isn’t easier right now).This also isn’t about the legalities of gun control, which is why I haven’t mentioned, “Gun ownership is a protected constitutional right and car ownership is not.”It’s about bad arguments. It’s about lazy comparisons that are treated as “incisive” or as “zingers” when they are actually aimed solely at those who don’t know any better.Anyone who argues to “regulate guns like cars” almost certainly:Is being deliberately disingenuous,Hasn’t thought it through very carefully,Has little or no idea how guns are currently regulated,Has little or no idea how cars are currently regulated, orTwo or more of the above.But whether intentional or inadvertent, this is one of the most common fallacious arguments I see on a regular basis.Original Question:“What are the most common fallacies in political debates on the internet?”Footnotes[1] Costs of gunshot and cut/stab wounds in the United States, with some Canadian comparisons - PubMed

The question assumes that the real world is a monolith, and by that yardstick Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) is an outlier. If that's true, Yes, IRMA is too idealistic, too naive and too rigid for the real world. Let me explain.A young participant joins PRM (program in rural management), and even before attending his/ her first classroom session, the participant is sent to live in a village anywhere in India for One full week. The participant is encouraged not to come out of the village for the full duration and soak in as much as possible the nitty-gritties of rural life in that week's time-span. Do you call it real! The participant stays with a real family, sleeps in their home, and eats with them. When home is small, participants find other possibilities. For record, I slept, during my induction program, in the buffalo-shade as the family had just one room in which all 6 members of the family slept.Due to its unique and independent pattern of selection, IRMA gets majority of its participants who would have gone through the decision making process of joining IRMA with its pros-n-con debated and internalized. Public image of IRMA pushes some participants not to consider it at all, whereas the other type (idealistic, naïve and rigid) find a pull for what the institute stands for (in public image, i.e.). However, for the majority who are looking for “admission in a good MBA institute”, IRMA makes the cut for its quality teaching, successful alumni and decent placements (seemingly three basic decision making parameters for MBA aspirants). But for majority who join IRMA as PRM participants, the final decision is influenced by the fact that IRMA never had any year with sub-100% placement, and that the quality of education is excellent. Here, if I may summarise, the three parameters that the question throws (Idealism, naivity, rigidity) don’t hold.IRMA has a concept of “designated organizations” list which are allowed to participate in its campus placements. This list has the luxury of being restricted. Legend has it that in IRMA's initial years even TAS (Tata Administrative Services) was not allowed to participate in campus placements as it didn’t make its credentials of meeting IRMA objectives clear. Anyway, the point is that IRMA is not a rigid institution closed to changing landscape of Indian opportunity market. Case in point are financial institutions which have increasingly been allowed to recruit IRMA participants from campus (from Nabard and Sidbi, which feel a natural fit; to commercial banks like ICICI Bank, Axis Bank etc, which on the face of it do not make the cut but have been allowed given their actual contribution to the rural economy). FMCG majors like ITC and HLL, and CSR of all major corporations are now "designated". Some observers point out that the pace of acceptance/ change has been slow, but the change is real. Rigidity in that sense is there, but stubbornness is not.Coming to the question of naivity, isn’t one of the purpose of education to keep the sense of naivity alive in all of us, to look at things afresh, to question the inertia and optimize the equilibrium. More than using the word “naivity”, I would call it “character”. For an institute to have a defining character is not only desirable but mandatory. Otherwise, what will it stand for! IRMA has its own character. Fortunately, we have many other institutions with defining characters in India. You marvel at one Nasiruddin Shah or Nawazuddin Siddique, and someone says “they are from NSD”. You say, “Yeah, that explains”. You see a Medha Patekar fighting for rights of displaced families, and her Bio Data reads “TISS”, and you again go “Yeah, that explains”. You read about Sanjay Ghosh (of Majuli fame), MD Mr. Sodhi (of Amul fame), or Siva (of ITC E-chaupal fame), and you go “yeah, that explains too”.To summarise, there is no one real world. There are multiple realities, and one of them happens to be IRMA. IRMA is neither too rigid, nor too naïve nor too idealistic. It’s a living institution with some strong “raison d'etre”. It has been found slow in changing. But that doesn’t mean its indifferent or deaf. Some observers applaud IRMA for its response (which is not to be in a mile-race, but be calculative, sensitive and balanced for a marathon).