Domain: opposingviews.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to opposingviews.com.
Comments · 34
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Re:Or is it the other way around?
It's enough of a problem that they're refusing to release tapes of it happening. http://www.opposingviews.com/i...
"To release these videos would create a high level of racially insensitive commentary toward the district," BART told Allen. "And in addition it would create a racial bias in the riders against minorities on the trains."
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Re:How about voter ID?
They closed the entire DMV for several years in order to prevent people from acquiring an ID?
No, they focused heavily on the offices that minorities could conveniently use, which was kinda revealing.
The freaking blog you pointed to is a lie,
Identify one falsehood in it. Go ahead.
there are a lot of other things going on into making those decisions, you can get an ID at the post office, from the DMV through the mail or online.
Yes, racists are practiced at finding excuses for their behavior, literacy tests and poll taxes were usually defended under those same terms. Including you know, misinforming the public about the situation.
But hey, if you want the state to mail out ID to everybody, go ahead and propose it.
You need an ID to buy booze, medicine and cigarettes, you're saying no black person buys booze, medicine or cigarettes?
Actually, I've found that sales clerks will rarely bother me about booze or cigarettes even if they are supposed to get ID, but I understand some people do have complaints about that process, medicine is somewhat different, but then, there are problems with pharmacists denying people's prescriptions. And don't even get my mother started on the way they hassled her about her diabetic testing strips refill, then tried to bill her after they FAILED to give her the number of strips she needed the first time when she asked for more. She gets quite irate at them.
If you close 31 DMV offices you do not "save only $100,000"
... argh, there is just so much wrong with this that it's not even worth pointing out. If it isn't obvious that this is partisan bullshit grasping at straws to make a point then you're dumber than you realize..Sure man, you come right after an accusation that relied on false counter cries of racism and bigotry to ignore actual racism and bigotry, and you think it's other people who are full of partisan bullshit.
Sorry man, there's a reason it keeps being revealed.
And it gets worse as apparently it was Bentley's paramour behind it.
Crickets, eh? Interesting sound they make.
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Re: I thought Trump was supposed to take care of t
Presidents don't create jobs.
You mean he was lying about that too? NO, no no. He said it and we must believe!
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
Since being elected, he's created over 600 thousand already. To wit:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i...
At the top of our agenda is the creation of great high-paying jobs for American workers, and we've made a lot of progress," Trump said, according to Politico. "You see what's going on," Trump added. "You see the numbers. We've created over 600,000 jobs already in a very short period of time, and it's gonna really start catching on now because some of the things that we've done are big league, and they are catching on. Already, we've created more than almost 600,000 jobs."
We're winning baby! We're finally winning.
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Re:If his phone can easily be hacked,
Still trying to get over your Obama Derangement Syndrome?
You know, if you weren't so deadset on repealing the Affordable Care Act, you'd be able to get treated for it.
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Re:Russians really hate Hillary
Now for a slice of reality, the Russian government does not care which one is elected, Trump or Clinton, as they are empty figure heads
I don't think you realize how serious this election is. Putin regards the breakup of the Soviet Union as a great tragedy. Only one of those candidates is implying that Russia can invade former USSR states like Estonia unless they cough up money they don't have.
So they purged the democrat rolls of Bernie Sanders supporters
I had no problem when I went to vote for Sanders. Nobody I knew who voted for Sanders (lots of people) was "purged" from the "democrat rolls". And when I eagerly rifled through that DNC dump looking for dirt on Hillary, I came up empty.
One truly laughable complaint by Clinton against Trump, critiquing Trump for inciting violence, seriously WTF?
Yeah, WTF is right... Trump wasn't calling for assassination, just "armed revolt"!
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Re:Children are not buying these devices.
In the US you are correct. In the EU this gets a little stickier, for example:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i...Parents in France can be sued for posting pics of their children without permission.
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Re:Density is nice, but what about longevity?
Let's work it out. A few years ago, TechReport ran an SSD endurance experiment to figure out how much punishment current-gen SSDs could take before failing. Their test setup essentially involved writing random data at maximum speed for 18 months straight. The results indicated that the worst SSD in their bunch, a Intel's 335 Series, wrote about 700 TB before dying, and the best SSD, a Samsung 840 Pro SSD, went on to 2.4 PB.
Various estimates say you can put between 60-75 hours of HD content on a 500GB drive, so, assuming the largest possible size, that works out to about 8.3 GB/hour. Since you're writing two streams, that's 16.6 GB/hour, or 145 TB per year. For the worst drive in the bunch, that's about 4.8 years of service (right at the upper end of your HDD's service life); for the best drive, it's over 16 years.
Keep in mind that these tests were all run on 250GB drives. Smaller drives have less flash to work with, and have to write over the same flash cells more often. Therefore, if you bought a 1TB drive, you can expect the lifetime to be easily 4x better (more if you're using a more recent drive, such as the Samsung 850 Pro) - 64 years of DVR recording should be more than sufficient.
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Re:One Assumption
I have no idea what MightyMartian thinks the Tea Party is all about, but TEA means "Taxed Enough Already". It's about focusing on the economic issues over the social/cultural issues. IMHO, the "core conservative base" isn't as hung on cultural crap as the Republican party tries to be.
Riiiight...
Tea Party candidate advocates for stoning homosexuals to death.
Tea Party candidate against abortion and against exceptions for incest or rape.
Tea Party candidate takes Medicaid for 8 of his kids, but, thinks Medicaid and all welfare programs should be abolished.
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Re:masdf
Do you have a source for that? Certainly there are narcs, but I've never heard of any of them enrolling in high schools undercover. Cops threatening high school kids who got caught anyway to cough up some names, sure. But when they invest an undercover agent (= lots of money), it's going to be for a big investigation, not to find out which high school kid sold a dimebag to which other high school kid.
I heard the story on NPR where a highschool kid gets a crush on a new girl. The girl asks him to get her some drugs. He isn't a dealer, nor does he even do drugs, but he talks to some people and is able to get her some where he gets busted for his reward. http://www.alternet.org/story/...
It doesn't sound like an isolated incident either. http://www.opposingviews.com/i...
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Re:The feminists want you to find a way!
Finally someone standing up and going "The problem isn't discrimination, the problem is those people just aren't THERE to be hired!"
Except these code.org people are absolutely wrong, as usual. They're closer to the trail than the feminists and others who blame hiring practices, but they're still far from the root cause.
The real problem isn't the education pipeline. As TFS notes, only one male student in Mississippi bothered to take the AP CS exam. What most of these organizations don't seem to understand is that this is not the Soviet Union, and you can't force people to go into degree fields they're not interested in. The problem is our culture, plain and simple. No one wants to go into this field except a certain subset of the population which is almost 100% white and male, and also certain groups of non-Americans (or at least 2nd generation immigrants), namely Indians and also some Chinese. It's all about culture.
In American culture, being a developer or software engineer or whatever term you want to use is simply not seen as a prestigious career path. People in this career path are generally treated poorly and don't make that much money compared to career paths with similar educational requirements and difficulty, and the prestige is pathetic. Honestly, someone who starts a restaurant or a plumbing business has more social prestige and status than a software engineer. For the same education, you could get a degree in finance and work on Wall Street and have beautiful NYC women throwing themselves at you. You won't have that in the software field; women will run the other way when they find out what you do for a living (though they'll want to call you up when they have a computer problem, expecting you to come over and fix it for free).
As far as I'm concerned, there's simply no way to fix this. America has long been an anti-intellectual culture; just look at how many people still believe that vaccines cause autism. People here would rather believe a comedian who tells them this, rather than hordes of doctors and scientists who tell them it's bullshit. Think about this for a minute: the average American, looking for medical advice, will believe a comedian over a doctor or a medical researcher. What does that say about our culture?
I think we should just give up and accept that this is not going to change. You can't change culture with a government mandate.
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Re:doubtful
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Re:here we go again
Fair enough. Then science teachers should probably stop telling students that the Bible is fiction: http://www.opposingviews.com/i... and that they can't talk about it: http://losangeles.cbslocal.com...
The Bible itself is classified as "non fiction" because "The Bible" is a collection of assorted writings and essays which are real writings... real as in they really exist. The classification is NOT claiming that those stories are actually true, the individual books and stories aren't classified at all.
Neither one of your "citations" are on-topic, one is a reading assignment in a Middle School language credit class, the other one was about a 1st grader who was giving a speech about family traditions at Christmas time. Those have absolutely nothing to do with Science class, or Science teachers.
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Re:here we go again
Fair enough. Then science teachers should probably stop telling students that the Bible is fiction: http://www.opposingviews.com/i... and that they can't talk about it: http://losangeles.cbslocal.com...
If I wanted to talk about Sense and Sensibility in science class, the teacher would be perfectly within their rights to tell me to knock it off and stick to science. I don't see why the Bible should be any different. You want to talk about the Bible? Fine. Wait until your World Mythologies class and talk your heart out. Lots of nonfiction also has no place in the science class, but fiction can pretty safely be categorically excluded.
Don't want people calling the Bible fiction? Don't talk to people who know better. That applies to life in general, not just school.
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Re:here we go again
Fair enough. Then science teachers should probably stop telling students that the Bible is fiction: http://www.opposingviews.com/i... and that they can't talk about it: http://losangeles.cbslocal.com...
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Re:It could have been a lot worse
It could have been a woman with her face uncovered. Or a woman, period, driving the car naked. The sentence would be death by stoning and/or beheading.
It is illegal for women to drive a car in Saudi Arabia regardless of what they are wearing and women have received sentences of being whipped with a lash for driving there as recently as 2011.
But there are worse places in the Middle East, where women have been stoned to death for owning a cell phone. -
Re:Privacy is for the rich
Another example: Poor families in Florida are being compelled to submit to inaccurate and degrading urine tests in order to receive the pittance of ever-decreasing social assistance they're entitled to.
(Not a reference, but further demonstration of worsening mistreatment of the poor.)
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Uhg, not Cass Sunstein
This is the same guy that thinks animals should have a right to sue people:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/cass-sunstein-proposes-that-animals-should-have-legal-right-to-sue
Nothing this guy says should be taken seriously.
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Re:Actions to take
Slightly tongue in cheek but a good statistic is that toddlers (3mo - 6y) killed more Americans than terrorists did in the last year. http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/toddlers-killed-more-americans-terrorists-did-year
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I'm no fan of PETA, but...
Let me preface this comment by stating that, as an animal advocate, I am not in ideological alignment with PETA and I do not generally support this organization. That said, Nathan Winograd's HuffPo article amounts to little more than malicious hearsay and it is incredibly biased, leaving out critical information in favor of whipping lazy readers into a furor. PETA does not euthanize adoptable animals. PETA has an open-door program in place to accept and euthanize sick and injured animals which cannot be accepted into other animal shelters, in order to prevent them from being abandoned otherwise. Limited resources necessarily force animal shelters to pick and choose which animals they will accept and when they will accept them -- leaving some unwanted animals with no other place to go but the roadside or the dumpster. People who don't want their pet, or can't afford to treat the pet's illness or injury, will abandon them. It's horrible, but it happens all the time. If there isn't a place, especially in a large and poorer urban area, that will accept any animal at any time regardless of condition, people abandon them. It's that simple. As someone who has lived in rural areas for more than fifteen years, I've seen the little-discussed end result of the failed "no-kill" mission and limited-admission shelters -- a constant stream of aggressive, injured, and sick pets dumped on country roads because the local shelter turned them away. As far as I can tell, PETA has not attempted to deceive the public about their program or its purpose -- in fact, PETA maintains a website about the program called "Why PETA Euthanizes." PETA appears to be quite public about this program and why they believe it is necessary. Furthermore, Winograd is believed to be responsible for posting anonymous comments on articles by or about him to make it seem as though he has reinforcements. Truth is an absolute defense to slander/libel claims, but PETA absolutely has the right to sue for defamation if the comments are untrue. Further reading: http://www.whypetaeuthanizes.com/ http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/animal-rights/rebuttal-huffington-posts-nathan-j-winograd http://www.houstonpress.com/2009-01-29/news/barc-sucks/6/
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TSA Sandwich
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Re:Attack of the Clones
My first post ever... how was this modded a 5?
I said BEGINNING its death spiral. That you can't see a trend right before your very eyes says more about you than Apple.
Right back at you.
Top Execs fired at apple for major maps failures.
This is not a bad thing for Apple. Firing people who do a terrible job is a good thing.
Deliberate production caps on new releases just so they can say they sold out.
Even after looking at your source... this is a load of crap. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get production ramped up to ship the first 5 million units? I would say this is an operational reality, not a marketing decision to have shortages.
Iphone 5 sales faltering.
This article said nothing of faltering sales. It said some analysts took a dartboard approach toward estimating sales.
Samsung is ecstatic about selling 16 million GS3's in a quarter. Apple sold 5 million iphones in a week. But sure, iphone sales are 'faltering'...
3 out of 4 smartphones purchases are Android.
Apple isn't looking to have the highest market share. The highest market share of smartphones (now that they are mainstream and more phone buyers are choosing smartphones) will be the smartphones that are free on contract. Android phones can be had free on contract, iphones can't. Apple doesn't care about not having the highest market share of smartphones. Samsung isn't looking for the GS3 to have the highest market share either. They both want profits, not highest market share.
Apple needs a refresh. Their initial sale clime with every new release is merely eating their own young, reselling to the same customer base while quietly running buy-back programs to take their old units off the street.
You are confusing deployed numbers with new new purchases which blinds you to trends. With a 3 year head start, Apple has a lot of faithful, who re-buy Apple each time. But New (first time) smartphone phone buyers are going 54% to Android and a distant 36% to Apple. The irresistible lure of Apple has worn off.
The market is calling TOP for Apple right now.
The market is not calling top for Apple right now. Large investors are beating down the price of AAPL, so they can get in at a lower price. It happens all the time, and it is easier to do when a bunch of reviews come out saying that Apple has terrible quality on the iphone, that maps sucks, that they don't have widgets, etc...
Clearly, consumers have a different take on 'quality' than the reviewers do.
For the record, I have only owned android phones, have had an ipad and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which I currently use). I recently bought an HTC One X. Not a fanboy by any means, but to say Apple is in the beginnings of a death spiral is lunacy. They are on track to sell close to 50 million iphones this quarter. That's quite a death rattle.
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
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Re:Attack of the Clones
I said BEGINNING its death spiral. That you can't see a trend right before your very eyes says more about you than Apple.
Top Execs fired at apple for major maps failures.
Deliberate production caps on new releases just so they can say they sold out.
Iphone 5 sales faltering.
3 out of 4 smartphones purchases are Android.Your "faltering sales" link is from September and says the iPhone 4s sold 4 million in it's first week, and the iPhone 5 sold 5 million in its first week, falling short of expectations of 6-8 million. What ground were those expectations based on? Would you like to comment on the iPhone 5 selling more in its first week than the previous model? No, I think you were intentionally being disingenuous, you creep.
Android is replacing dumbphones. You can get an Android phone for free with contract renewal, so most people just wind up with them. That's why despite having more users, they spend less money in the Android market ecosystem. Everyone knew this would happen and Apple would not race to the bottom, I don't know why anyone would be bragging about raw numbers of Android devices shipped.
Talk about RDF...
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Re:Attack of the Clones
I said BEGINNING its death spiral. That you can't see a trend right before your very eyes says more about you than Apple.
Top Execs fired at apple for major maps failures.
Deliberate production caps on new releases just so they can say they sold out.
Iphone 5 sales faltering.
3 out of 4 smartphones purchases are Android.Apple needs a refresh. Their initial sale clime with every new release is merely eating their own young, reselling to the same customer base while quietly running buy-back programs to take their old units off the street.
You are confusing deployed numbers with new new purchases which blinds you to trends. With a 3 year head start, Apple has a lot of faithful, who re-buy Apple each time. But New (first time) smartphone phone buyers are going 54% to Android and a distant 36% to Apple. The irresistible lure of Apple has worn off.
The market is calling TOP for Apple right now.
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My thoughts on this
Some people claim that all the top cyclists were doping, and if Lance won the Tour de France at all, he must have been doping as well.
That's possible, but if anyone could have won the tour without cheating, it was Lance Armstrong. He had all the legal advantages he could have: his team always had a bunch of the world's top cyclists, riding for him; his team always had enough money that they could just ride whatever training rides they thought would best help Lance win (many teams have to win races during the season to get the prize money; Lance's team had plenty of money and didn't need to do that). Manufacturers gave him their best new technology to use. Heck, he would go ride the toughest mountain climbs multiple times, trying different angles through the turns and seeing what numbers he got on his power meter. In short, he had every legal edge.
On the other hand, the Tour de France is possibly the toughest athletic competition in the world, without hyperbole. How many competitions take 21 days to complete, with the athletes working hard for hours and only two rest days? And all that in the July heat in France? My bike mechanic says that he believes all the top riders are cheating, just because with that level of effort, the cheating would give an edge that non-cheaters couldn't touch.
Also, I'm deeply suspicious of the anti-cheating lab work. When Floyd Landis was accused of doping with synthetic testosterone, all sorts of details came out: the lab knew which sample was his, the lab engaged in shoddy lab work and flawed chain-of-custody procedures, and (worst of all, in my opinion) the same lab tested both the "A" and "B" samples. (Never mind whether a French lab is "out to get" an American athlete... it would be highly embarrassing if the "B" result was negative after all the hoopla over the "A" result. I would have much rather seen that B sample sent to a different lab in Switzerland or something.)
I'm also troubled by the question of fairness. There is an old saying, "military justice bears the same relationship to justice that military music bears to music." The anti-doping system is stacked against the athlete; once an athlete is accused, bad things happen to the athlete, and there is no hope. Even in the case of Floyd Landis, where a bunch of people worked to help him and submitted all sorts of testimony that (IMHO) invalidated all the evidence against him, he was still found guilty and stripped of his Tour win. (Later he confessed, so maybe he was guilty after all... but I still am not convinced that the evidence used against him should have been used.)
The USADA proceedings are not legal proceedings in a courtroom environment, and the protections that the accused receive in a courtroom are not there. The head of USADA gets to act as prosecutor, judge, and gets to hand-pick the jury: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/sports/other-sports/usada-s-travis-tygart-plays-prosecutor-jury-and-judge-lance-armstrong-case
Now for one moment assume that Lance Armstrong is completely innocent. What possible recourse does he have within the USADA system? How can you prove a negative? He was the most-tested man in all of sports and he never failed a test... USADA doesn't care. The witnesses against him have something to gain from denouncing him... USADA doesn't care. How can he prove that he wasn't doping 17 years ago? He doesn't have a witness who was with him 24/7 and can say he never doped. He doesn't have lab results of his own, and if he did he wouldn't be allowed to present them. So if he participates, all he can do is stand there and say "it's not true".
Some people think that Lance Armstrong is implicitly admitting guilt by not contesting this ruling. But his public statement explicitly says he n
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Re:The past sucked - time to admit it
Scanners are LESS safe than metal detectors: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/technology/gadgets/video-engineer-jonathan-corbett-shows-how-beat-tsa-body-scanners
They are designed to protect against an imaginary threat (there are no real-life ceramic guns) while missing very real-life good old metal guns. -
Re:Error My Ass
Not that it matters, but just to corret you: Hispanic is not a race. You can have black hispanics, white hispanics and every other colour hispanics.
What does matter is your lie about Obama: Obama was asked a direct question about the case in a press conference, following is a complete video of the answer. And at no time does he refer to Zimmerman as a white man.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/politics/2012-election/video-pres-obama-if-i-had-son-heâ(TM)d-look-trayvonI won't bother looking up the other accusations you made. The may be similarly full of shit or they may be true. It doesn't matter to the case. As I said Zimmerman's race is irrelevant.
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Re:My Pet Rock Is Better
This took about 2 minutes on google.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/tsa-weve-stopped-1000-guns-so-far-year
Ah, but how many of the guns caught by TSA were caught *only* because of TSA's procedures? Travelers had to go through metal detectors and their baggage through x-ray machines prior to TSA - did you think the prior security goons never caught any guns and knives being brought to the airport? I recall in pre-TSA days they'd always find my little pocket knife and check the length. (Back in the day you were allowed small blades)
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Re:Hurray.. ?Since the article is so terse, I figured there must be more to the story and found this better writeup. And even the pro-industry side.
Guess what? There is nothing more to the story. It's exactly what it sounds like: a money grab.
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Re:Since when is H. Clinton the speaker for unions
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/fmr-fbi-analyst-ray-mcgovern-i-was-beaten-at-hillary-clinton-speech
A former CIA analyst and retired Army officer (the article mistakenly calls him a former FBI analyst) stood silently in protest at the very speech you referenced, and was beaten by security guards for his insolence. It's highly relevant.
It should be noted that this same individual engaged Donald Rumsfeld in a debate at a Town Hall meeting in 2006, and Rumsfeld gave him more time to talk and defended his right to free speech. Yes, Hillary Clinton is less of a civil libertarian than Donald Rumsfeld. Welcome to Bizarro World, enjoy your stay.
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Re:"Anti-US" Hacker?
As the person who made the original post, allow me to share some food for thought. Violence "of the 24 major armed conflicts taking place worldwide in 2005, more than half (13) involved Muslim governments or paramilitary groups on one or both sides of the fighting. What's more, among six countries with "emerging armed conflicts," four are predominantly Muslim and another, Thailand, involves a Muslim separatist movement."
Domination- "A "pro-peace" rally in Antwerp peopled by mostly Moroccan Arab immigrants savaged a Jewish section of the city reminiscent of Kristallnacht. The author remarked, "Everybody knew that what happens in France can happen in Belgium as well, because both countries have large populations of Jews and larger populations of Arabs."
Destruction from the inside "Seeking Islamic law: Muslim leaders openly declare their goal of introducing Islamic law once Denmark's Muslim population grows large enough - a not-that-remote prospect. If present trends persist, one sociologist estimates, every third inhabitant of Denmark in 40 years will be Muslim.
The problem here, one they may actually destroy this country, is that the PC in the USA always try to make this into a "freedom of religion" issue. IT IS NOT. Islam is NOT a religion, it is a political movement with a religious component. BIG difference, in that nearly all mainstream religions can and do often get along with each other, whereas political movements seek control. Make NO mistake...the ultimate goal is a Sharia planet. Is that REALLY what you want to live in? But don't believe me, look up the levels of violence in Europe and compare them to the levels of Muslims. You will see that time, after time, after time again, once Muslims reach 10-15% here comes the violence, riots, and destruction.
The political movement known as Islam uses your beliefs against you. They believe in freedom of speech for the spread of Islam but will issue death threats and Fatwas upon all those that criticize or even draw a cartoon of Mohammad. They are all for freedom of religion when it comes to spreading Islam but try standing on a street corner preaching the bible in Saudi Arabia and see how long you last.
And finally I hate to Godwin, but frankly there is no more apt comparison, the PC that scream religion of peace remind me of nothing less than the old Soviet "useful idiots" or those that sought appeasement with Hitler. Just as then there is NO appeasement, because their ultimate political goals and the freedoms you enjoy or totally incompatible. But don't worry, you don't have to take my word for it. Look up "Sharia court" and France, Britain, or Germany. They have already set up a "shadow court" system based on Sharia there, and those three will be the first to fall, most likely France first. When it does take a long good hard look and decide for yourself: Is that how I want our country to be? Because I sure as fuck don't. I have NO PROBLEM with those that come here legally and try to integrate into our society, but they do not. They simply want to force their political values upon the world. Remember political system and NOT religion, no different than totalitarianism or fascism.
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Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!!
I hope the "second ammendment remedies" crowd is proud.
Where do you think the guns that fuel this bloodbath are coming from??
I debated on whether to use my mod points to mod this comment down as a troll, or to forgo the ego trip and answer the question.
The answer, as it turns out, is "not from the U.S."
Although the Mexican gov't has repeatedly asserted that U.S. is to blame for the flow of guns into Mexico, some forget that the U.S. has sent millions of firearms to various Central and South American factions, firearms that are readily available in Mexico (and not as a result of any 2nd Amendment rights bestowed on U.S. citizens). Or for your consideration: The blatant distortion of facts by which Mexican officials who, while claiming that 80-90% of the arms in Mexico come from the U.S. fail to mention that the number is extrapolated from a small sample of guns sent to the U.S. that could be traced. This fallacy is substantiated by numbers reported by the ATF in which Mexican authorities confiscated 29,000 firearms in 2008, of which only 5,000 were traceable to the U.S.
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Re:What surprises me
It's possible that you also might be making assumptions as to what constitutes this. There are some things that fall into this category that you might even be surprised by (I couldn't *quickly* find the links to examples of all the stories I've heard of in the past, but did include some)
I've heard stories of people being prosecuted under cp laws for:
- Cartoon porn (such as sexually explicit Simpsons images). Hey, technically, isn't Maggie over 18 by now? I kid!
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- Photos by parents or a grandmother of their kid running around nude or taking a bath.
- Photos of legal over 18 women, who look like (or are portrayed as) being under 18.
- Teen girls taking pictures of themselves in their bras.
- Legal images of minors held by people that prosecutors convinced the courts that they had the images to fuel their perverse fantasies (thought crime).
- Probably some other dumb things that I'm not even aware of.I have no idea how many are involved in images that involve real abuse of real kids their are out there. I wish I could be as optimistic as you and believe it was that rare... but I don't. I expect it's far more common, even if for the curiosity factor.
However, the thing is you bring up an interesting comparison with serial killers. Could there be people who have had "killing fantasies", maybe even had materials (books, movies, magazines) that related to the subject, but never actually harm a living person? Does this ever happen? Could it happen with other crimes too? I honestly don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a far fetched idea.
I'm in favor of protecting our children from actual predators, but I'm not so crazy about catching innocents in the overly large net and ruining lives with overzealous prosecution.
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Re:Stop this now.
You dont have to be a jerk to people you dont agree with.
Theres no great shame in being in the Animal Rights movement, in case you havnt noticed, "animal rights" people are often parading about naked, or in cages. Its not like its some shameful thing we hide away!
Anywho, Gary Francione is probably the best person to point to as being Animal Rights compared to PETA and their Welfare movement.
Here Francione mentions being suprised to be on the same side as PETA, if you want to see his videos on welfare vs rights, then feel free to watch.
http://www.opposingviews.com/arguments/a-note-about-differences-with-peta
"PETA may have started as a worthwhile organization, but it has become an end in itself and exploited nonhumans are merely âoepropsâ in an endless series of self-promotions that have turned PETA into a multi-million dollar organization that has abandoned any claim to be abolitionist in any serious sense. PETA is hindering, and not helping, the cause of animal rights. But then, if PETAâ(TM)s giving an award to âoevisionaryâ slaughterhouse designer and animal exploiter Temple Grandin, or PETAâ(TM)s position that animal rights means dead animals, did not cause you to come to the conclusion that PETA has gone so far astray as to have lost the path entirely, then perhaps a full frontal striptease performed by a woman extolling the virtues of animal welfare juxtaposed with scenes of animal exploitation and ending with Dr. Martin Luther King will not bother you either."
One of PETAs awards to people who "lessen the suffering" or whatever of animals, thats whats called Animal Welfare.
http://www.peta.org/feat/proggy/2004/winners.html
On the same page as Temple Grandin, slaughterhouse designer, Whole Foods "Whole Foods has consistently done more for animal welfare than any retailer in the industry, requiring that its producers adhere to strict standards. Recently, Whole Foods launched the Animal Compassion Foundation. John Mackey, the chair, CEO, and cofounder of Whole Foods Market, observed, "By creating the Foundation, Whole Foods Market is pioneering an entirely new way for people to relate to farm animalsâ"with the animals' welfare becoming the most important goal."
Hey, heres a hint, if what the animal feels is most important, they wouldnt be chopping it up and selling its body! See, thats the welfare thing "people are going to eat animals, so we might as well ask them politely but firmly not to beat them so hard before they die".
I have better things to do than be insulted by you, so unless you have any genuine questions, consider this my last post. -
Re:Lol Democracy
I'm fairly certain they're still ignoring the issue that the most people were interested in changing, legalization of marijuana.
California already voted on that. Then Washington told them they don't get to choose anymore.
There are efforts to fix that. Oddly enough, it's a joint effort by Barney Frank and Ron Paul. Talk about strange bedfellows!