In Catholic terms it is highly heretical to put Satan on the same tier as the Trinity. Satan/Lucifer is allegedly a created being whose power and will are granted to him by Yahweh in the same way as any other created being. There are Christian sects (Gnostics/Cathars) that consider Satan/Lucifer as being the creator of evil in the same way that Yahweh is the creator of good (which would require that his power comes from himself as opposed to some kind of delegation to avoid ethical associative problems). These sects were considered heretical by the Catholic church and were persecuted upon as much or moreso than pagans.
You exaggerate beyond credulity. In the first place, all those pressures you speak of impacting 'mass media' also impact blogs. You don't think blogs lose credibility, audience, when they are caught in lies just the same as MSM? Do you think hyper extremist blogs have the same number of readers as those that are more moderate?
Mass media has been a tool of state propaganda continuously throughout history. It frequently bends to political pressure, complying with things like sedition acts etc., and even is openly a part of some governments (e.g. Xinhua). Blogs recapture the spirit of the pamphleteers of American Revolution. They may act with political purposes, but they are not puppets. (Which is not to say a few sock puppet blogs don't exist, but they tend to be marginal and eventually exposed.)
To denounce the blogosphere because of birthers or truthers is as fundamentally flawed as attacking all books because of Mein Kampf. It's simply a means of communication, and it's no different for a person to have to form opinions about blogs than books, or even news channels with hours of "opinion" shows.
MSM has show itself collectively to be liars as well, and just as "openly do not care bout the truth or fact checking or credibility" as was made plain by the fiasco of the Killian documents which the blogosphere discredited.
Liar. "Foreigners don't get to vote" is an assertion of fact, and the only systemic mechanism for denial is a legal one. It's bad enough that you were ignorant and wrong, trying to lie your way out of it is pathetic.
I could give you a huge analogy about how political spending impacts the electorate, but you're not worth the time at this point. You are clearly a die hard enemy of free speech, as you want to censor any speech you think isn't "equal" because of how much it costs. Take your lies and ignorance and piss off.
Its "golden age" was far too short and never came close to the enlightenment of Christian states today.
The enlightenment of both Christendom and the Islamic world came from the same source: the Greeks. If anything is inherently positive about 'Christian society' is that it steps aside just a little more easily than an Islamic one. The key point is that civilization is advanced to the degree that it rejects religion generally and monotheism especially (monotheism is inherently anti-pluralistic).
So in the Koran, jihad fighters are encouraged to take slaves and have sex with them. In the Bible, it says it is wrong to have sex with a slave, but you are not punished very much.
You must not have read very carefully then, as there is Deut 20:13-14 wherein the Israelites were told that when they conquered a territory they could certainly take the virgin girls (which in the period would be almost invariably children) as concubines. You also are not seeing that in the verses you quote it specifies that the punishment is incurred only when the slave girl is engaged to be married, otherwise she's just another slave/concubine and is fair game for rape any time.
They're not voting, they are speaking. The Constitution is clear: anybody can speak, regardless of citizenship. There were no Constitutional considerations about voting before the Civil War, it was up to the states to decide for themselves who could vote. Outside of the overarching conditions set out in the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments the states still decide who can vote and who can't, and in some localities it is possible by law for non-citizens to vote.
It is clear by your ignorant, flat wrong assertions that you have neither the learning nor desire to learn that makes the furtherance of this exchange worth my time. If you would like a civics lesson I recommend you pay for it from an institution designed to render such services. In the meantime try to see that your insufficient grasp of US law, politics, and history do not unduly impede the work of the informed.
To be more interested in learning than fighting is to be commended. In such case I should direct you to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible section on women, if you're looking for the worst New Testament misogyny you'll find high concentrations in 1 Corinthians 7-14 and 1 Timothy 2-5. (Perhaps not-so-coincidentally immediately prior to Paul in 1 Timothy 6 telling slaves to keep-on-slavin' because not to do so would be blasphemy.)
There is a similar treatment of the Quran here. In terms of sheer quantity, the Bible beats the Quran by about a factor of seven. Qualitatively, IMO the Old Testament is worse than the Quran, but the New Testament is better. Degrees of injustice and inequality are not something to brag about though.
I was focusing on "divine beings" not prophets. If you want to have a no-holds-barred throw down about Christian vs. Muslim misogyny then I've got the Apostle Paul waiting in the wings. That's why I said 'Abrahamic religions' they're all full of misogynistic bullshit.
That of course ignores the conditional context of 'for I am not yet ascended to my Father'. This clearly establishes some relationship of 'not now because (why?), but later when (what?)'. The why is answered with precedent about the role and treatment of women in Judaism because the 'later when' condition had not changed when Jesus then asked Thomas to touch him.
The apologetics you linked to hand waves through the conditional context with some subjective stuff that could be reasonable if you make positive assumptions. I make negative assumptions based on the evidence from Mosaic law. That is my position, interpretation, and opinion.
This guy's second mistake (after thinking he was capable of any espionage at all) was to approach a foreign consulate. This isn't the 1940s anymore people. Consulates are not the hotbeds of espionage that they used to be. If he wanted to be an agent for a foreign intelligence organization, he should have tried to contact them directly in a manner not easily intercepted by SIGINT such as an old fashioned letter (or even better, contact them through a sympathetic radical political organization). Don't think that a nation's State Department or Ministry of Foreign Affairs is going to have time or interest in your petty cloak and dagger.
(The previous is no more than commentary and opinion and should not be construed as encouragement or advice to commit treason/fraud/etc.)
The Thirteenth Amendmendment would have never passed in the 1860s without the Civil War (which disenfranchised many of the Confederate loyalists as a consequence which helped pave the political road to adoption) and the Reconstruction Acts required the passage of the 13th Amendment for the defeated Confederate states to regain their equality and privileges within the Union. So don't hand wave the 'Constitutional process' because that's not how history went down.
Note, by the way, that both poll taxes and "literacy tests" were never actually allowed by the Constitution.
You have a basic ignorance of how US law works then. Unless you can point me to the line in the Constitution that disallows/forbids the practice, than that practice is (Constitutionally) allowed by default. The Constitution is not some Mosaic list of things you can and can't do, it's simply a framework for the federal government and an enumeration of some basic rights. Anything it doesn't specify is left open to state law by definition (Amendment X).
And there was a Constitutional solution to both anyway - if you disenfranchise someone, you can't count him for purposes of allotting Representatives.
I really don't know why I'm bothering at this point, you obviously are completely ignorant of American history, law, and political structure. Ever heard of the Electoral College, dawg? You see, it apportions representation by pure population, NOT suffrage. Women were counted before they were enfranchised. Slaves were counted under the 'three-fifths' compromise before they were freed and enfranchised.
You need to do a lot more reading before we can have a productive conversation methinks.
P.S. Literacy tests were eliminated by federal legislation, not overturned by any court on Constitutional grounds (even though IMO they should have been).
You can't have it both ways, either the Constitution applies to foreigners and they get freedom of speech and due process, or it doesn't and they don't get freedom of speech or due process. That's the whole point of 'equal protection':
[...] nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Abrahamic religions are so full of misogynistic shit. Whatever is bad for men is double bad for women, because women have cooties and are automatically inferior in the eyes of Allah/Yahweh/Jesus. (Yes, Jesus too, he tells women not to touch him in John 20:17 presumably because they are unclean, and commands a man to touch him ten verses later.) I love how according to Judaism when women give birth to boys they are "unclean" for a week, and when they give birth to girls they are "unclean" for two weeks. Ew, cooties! Bunch of superstitious chauvinists need to grow the fuck up.
So you would have been OK with the continuance of slavery in the South? Poll taxes? 'Literacy' tests? These are sincere questions, though they might seem antagonistic. I myself actually would have tolerated a slower, more peaceful end to slavery (as happened in every other country) as being better for the nation in the long run albeit at the continued oppression of some in the short run.
(My wife, who incidentally is black, thinks that the Civil War provided a social catharsis that was potentially worth both the political and human costs, but I can't bring myself to see the equivalency. Then again I lack the perspective of somebody with ancestry that can be traced to actual slaves of the 19th century.)
You could write entire books on the subject of what comprises 'reasonable' in the realm of law and society. It's not really a subject that I think can be productively addressed to my own satisfaction in this forum beyond the most obvious and superficial.
See my responses to Terwin and CrimsonAvenger, but one thing that should be addressed. Money is speech. The Supreme Court has said as much time and time again, and it's wholly accurate. Money buys access to media, TV, radio, dead trees, internet, everything. You can call it 'bribery' or 'corruption' but it is no more than a group of individuals pooling resources to advocate for their interests. As I said before, corporations are an integral part of the fabric of the nation, without which we'd be crawling in the dirt waiting for some country with an economy that works (because in large part it's full of corporations) to swoop in with enough "aid" resources to allow a near non-economy to function. You have an irrational axe to grind about corporations, and you're willing to chew off your own leg to solve some imaginary social problems.
~10000 bills are introduced in Congress every year. Do you think a human being can read 10000 bills back to front in less than a year? Especially now when some bills are more than a thousand pages long? While at the same time drafting their own bills, listening to constituents, meeting with colleagues, staff, committees? Ludicrous.
Does it suck? Yes, but the only way to fix it is to impose a limit on the number of bills that can be introduced, which would naturally have a dramatic impact on how responsive the legislature could be (and it's already slow). That would necessitate a more powerful executive to take up the slack. Is that what you want? A paralyzed legislative branch and a tyrant?
I don't like it anymore than the next guy, but I'm not so simple minded that I think you can hand wave it away as "they're just not doing their jobs".
The simple fact is that the US government is too big because the US itself is too big. If you want an efficient government you want a sovereign polis. Aristotle knew it, Machiavelli knew it, but the economic and military concerns have overridden any concern for a pure abstract efficient state. The state does not exist in a vacuum.
The only way to 'fix' the federal government would be to either fundamentally change it, say by imposing limits on the number of bills that could be written/sponsored in a session, or by completely dissolving it and letting the states become sovereign again (which are microcosms of the federal problem so that only partially ameliorates).
"Terrorism" does work sometimes. It got the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the French out of Algeria, to name but two. In fact many if not most revolutions contain a 'terrorist' component, but that label just happens to vanish if the revolution succeeds and consequently rewrites the history books making the deaths of innocents into political martyrs (which in Algeria especially was really the case, as the French orchestrated false flag terrorist attacks to undermine popular support for the local insurgency).
As for the rest, your post is tin foil hat nonsense. The President does not normally write laws (and any which he might would still have to be sponsored from committee to floor by a congressman), that's what executive orders are for. Further, congressmen, The President, cabinet members, etc. are all too busy to read most laws. That's not a secret. That's why they have a staff. Their staff researches proposed legislation, writes it, reads it, rewrites it, re-researches it, etc. and only briefs their superiors on key points. It's not a grand conspiracy, it's a simple adaptation to circumstances. There are too many bills which are too long for every congressman to read every one. Hell, many of the never make it out of committee, let alone pass a floor vote or actually get signed.
Oh but of course it's the evil, evil corporations who control everything! That's why the government was so unsuccessful at breaking up AT&T in the 80s... oh wait, it wasn't. Corporate interests are no less valid than the interests of an other institutions or individuals. They are a significant part of the economy and consequently the politics of that economy. I'm sick of all the anti-corporatism for anti-corporatism's sake. Everybody wants to ride the wagon and spit at it too.
Thanks for the redundancy so that you could spam some off-topic link. Why don't you take your spam to long dead posts on blogspot like all the other spammer assholes.
Do you really think that every minority interest group is going to be happy with the consensus of the majority all the time, every time? You talk about the 'principles of free software' as a panacea, ignoring that the free software movement has the same problems. Some person or minority of persons gets upset with decisions made by a larger group of core developers for a project, and what happens? Fork. The only way that government can fork is by 'segregating people' whether done by geography (which is the most logistically accommodating) or by some as-yet-untried model such as panarchism (which would be a logistical nightmare).
The fact about humans is that you can never please all of the people all of the time. No matter how reasonable a given consensus is, there will always be a minority that feels otherwise, and because there are always a few people playing without a full deck, an even smaller subset of a given minority may be emotional enough to think it's worth killing over. That's not a 'failure of democracy', that's life. Deal with it.
Yeah, that whole instant verbal translation thing is totally worthless. Who wants a universal translator anyway when we could just continue to live insular, uncultured, ignorant lives? Good plan.
Kurzweil has done more for human progress than you likely ever will. You're probably jealous and express that jealousy through baseless hatred. Have fun being a douche.
Canada is not a monolith. There are places in Canada where people say 'aboot' and consequently all Canada is mocked through them. Just as "American" accents are mocked through those prevalent in the Deep South, or the Valley Girl "dialect", when most of the country sounds like neither. (Being from Washington State, people sometimes think *I'm* Canadian, which happens to many who live in border states, though especially to those from ND, MN, WI, MI and ME.)
P.S. People who pronounce 'both' like 'bolth' need to be slapped until they stop. There is no goddamn 'L' in that word.
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In Catholic terms it is highly heretical to put Satan on the same tier as the Trinity. Satan/Lucifer is allegedly a created being whose power and will are granted to him by Yahweh in the same way as any other created being. There are Christian sects (Gnostics/Cathars) that consider Satan/Lucifer as being the creator of evil in the same way that Yahweh is the creator of good (which would require that his power comes from himself as opposed to some kind of delegation to avoid ethical associative problems). These sects were considered heretical by the Catholic church and were persecuted upon as much or moreso than pagans.
You exaggerate beyond credulity. In the first place, all those pressures you speak of impacting 'mass media' also impact blogs. You don't think blogs lose credibility, audience, when they are caught in lies just the same as MSM? Do you think hyper extremist blogs have the same number of readers as those that are more moderate?
Mass media has been a tool of state propaganda continuously throughout history. It frequently bends to political pressure, complying with things like sedition acts etc., and even is openly a part of some governments (e.g. Xinhua). Blogs recapture the spirit of the pamphleteers of American Revolution. They may act with political purposes, but they are not puppets. (Which is not to say a few sock puppet blogs don't exist, but they tend to be marginal and eventually exposed.)
To denounce the blogosphere because of birthers or truthers is as fundamentally flawed as attacking all books because of Mein Kampf. It's simply a means of communication, and it's no different for a person to have to form opinions about blogs than books, or even news channels with hours of "opinion" shows.
MSM has show itself collectively to be liars as well, and just as "openly do not care bout the truth or fact checking or credibility" as was made plain by the fiasco of the Killian documents which the blogosphere discredited.
I never said it was illegal.
Liar. "Foreigners don't get to vote" is an assertion of fact, and the only systemic mechanism for denial is a legal one. It's bad enough that you were ignorant and wrong, trying to lie your way out of it is pathetic.
I could give you a huge analogy about how political spending impacts the electorate, but you're not worth the time at this point. You are clearly a die hard enemy of free speech, as you want to censor any speech you think isn't "equal" because of how much it costs. Take your lies and ignorance and piss off.
Its "golden age" was far too short and never came close to the enlightenment of Christian states today.
The enlightenment of both Christendom and the Islamic world came from the same source: the Greeks. If anything is inherently positive about 'Christian society' is that it steps aside just a little more easily than an Islamic one. The key point is that civilization is advanced to the degree that it rejects religion generally and monotheism especially (monotheism is inherently anti-pluralistic).
So in the Koran, jihad fighters are encouraged to take slaves and have sex with them. In the Bible, it says it is wrong to have sex with a slave, but you are not punished very much.
You must not have read very carefully then, as there is Deut 20:13-14 wherein the Israelites were told that when they conquered a territory they could certainly take the virgin girls (which in the period would be almost invariably children) as concubines. You also are not seeing that in the verses you quote it specifies that the punishment is incurred only when the slave girl is engaged to be married, otherwise she's just another slave/concubine and is fair game for rape any time.
They're not voting, they are speaking. The Constitution is clear: anybody can speak, regardless of citizenship. There were no Constitutional considerations about voting before the Civil War, it was up to the states to decide for themselves who could vote. Outside of the overarching conditions set out in the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments the states still decide who can vote and who can't, and in some localities it is possible by law for non-citizens to vote.
It is clear by your ignorant, flat wrong assertions that you have neither the learning nor desire to learn that makes the furtherance of this exchange worth my time. If you would like a civics lesson I recommend you pay for it from an institution designed to render such services. In the meantime try to see that your insufficient grasp of US law, politics, and history do not unduly impede the work of the informed.
To be more interested in learning than fighting is to be commended. In such case I should direct you to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible section on women, if you're looking for the worst New Testament misogyny you'll find high concentrations in 1 Corinthians 7-14 and 1 Timothy 2-5. (Perhaps not-so-coincidentally immediately prior to Paul in 1 Timothy 6 telling slaves to keep-on-slavin' because not to do so would be blasphemy.)
There is a similar treatment of the Quran here. In terms of sheer quantity, the Bible beats the Quran by about a factor of seven. Qualitatively, IMO the Old Testament is worse than the Quran, but the New Testament is better. Degrees of injustice and inequality are not something to brag about though.
I was focusing on "divine beings" not prophets. If you want to have a no-holds-barred throw down about Christian vs. Muslim misogyny then I've got the Apostle Paul waiting in the wings. That's why I said 'Abrahamic religions' they're all full of misogynistic bullshit.
That of course ignores the conditional context of 'for I am not yet ascended to my Father'. This clearly establishes some relationship of 'not now because (why?), but later when (what?)'. The why is answered with precedent about the role and treatment of women in Judaism because the 'later when' condition had not changed when Jesus then asked Thomas to touch him.
The apologetics you linked to hand waves through the conditional context with some subjective stuff that could be reasonable if you make positive assumptions. I make negative assumptions based on the evidence from Mosaic law. That is my position, interpretation, and opinion.
This guy's second mistake (after thinking he was capable of any espionage at all) was to approach a foreign consulate. This isn't the 1940s anymore people. Consulates are not the hotbeds of espionage that they used to be. If he wanted to be an agent for a foreign intelligence organization, he should have tried to contact them directly in a manner not easily intercepted by SIGINT such as an old fashioned letter (or even better, contact them through a sympathetic radical political organization). Don't think that a nation's State Department or Ministry of Foreign Affairs is going to have time or interest in your petty cloak and dagger.
(The previous is no more than commentary and opinion and should not be construed as encouragement or advice to commit treason/fraud/etc.)
Note, by the way, that both poll taxes and "literacy tests" were never actually allowed by the Constitution.
You have a basic ignorance of how US law works then. Unless you can point me to the line in the Constitution that disallows/forbids the practice, than that practice is (Constitutionally) allowed by default. The Constitution is not some Mosaic list of things you can and can't do, it's simply a framework for the federal government and an enumeration of some basic rights. Anything it doesn't specify is left open to state law by definition (Amendment X).
And there was a Constitutional solution to both anyway - if you disenfranchise someone, you can't count him for purposes of allotting Representatives.
I really don't know why I'm bothering at this point, you obviously are completely ignorant of American history, law, and political structure. Ever heard of the Electoral College, dawg? You see, it apportions representation by pure population, NOT suffrage. Women were counted before they were enfranchised. Slaves were counted under the 'three-fifths' compromise before they were freed and enfranchised.
You need to do a lot more reading before we can have a productive conversation methinks.
P.S. Literacy tests were eliminated by federal legislation, not overturned by any court on Constitutional grounds (even though IMO they should have been).
[...] nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
14th Amendment, weasel out of that one douchebag.
Abrahamic religions are so full of misogynistic shit. Whatever is bad for men is double bad for women, because women have cooties and are automatically inferior in the eyes of Allah/Yahweh/Jesus. (Yes, Jesus too, he tells women not to touch him in John 20:17 presumably because they are unclean, and commands a man to touch him ten verses later.) I love how according to Judaism when women give birth to boys they are "unclean" for a week, and when they give birth to girls they are "unclean" for two weeks. Ew, cooties! Bunch of superstitious chauvinists need to grow the fuck up.
Go to a registrar and whois search short domain names for .us. You'll find most (if not all) of them are taken.
So you're saying the Constitution doesn't apply to foreigners eh? Glad we can agree that illegal immigrants have no right to due process. Cool.
So you would have been OK with the continuance of slavery in the South? Poll taxes? 'Literacy' tests? These are sincere questions, though they might seem antagonistic. I myself actually would have tolerated a slower, more peaceful end to slavery (as happened in every other country) as being better for the nation in the long run albeit at the continued oppression of some in the short run.
(My wife, who incidentally is black, thinks that the Civil War provided a social catharsis that was potentially worth both the political and human costs, but I can't bring myself to see the equivalency. Then again I lack the perspective of somebody with ancestry that can be traced to actual slaves of the 19th century.)
You could write entire books on the subject of what comprises 'reasonable' in the realm of law and society. It's not really a subject that I think can be productively addressed to my own satisfaction in this forum beyond the most obvious and superficial.
That would be, you know, the point.
See my responses to Terwin and CrimsonAvenger, but one thing that should be addressed. Money is speech. The Supreme Court has said as much time and time again, and it's wholly accurate. Money buys access to media, TV, radio, dead trees, internet, everything. You can call it 'bribery' or 'corruption' but it is no more than a group of individuals pooling resources to advocate for their interests. As I said before, corporations are an integral part of the fabric of the nation, without which we'd be crawling in the dirt waiting for some country with an economy that works (because in large part it's full of corporations) to swoop in with enough "aid" resources to allow a near non-economy to function. You have an irrational axe to grind about corporations, and you're willing to chew off your own leg to solve some imaginary social problems.
~10000 bills are introduced in Congress every year. Do you think a human being can read 10000 bills back to front in less than a year? Especially now when some bills are more than a thousand pages long? While at the same time drafting their own bills, listening to constituents, meeting with colleagues, staff, committees? Ludicrous.
Does it suck? Yes, but the only way to fix it is to impose a limit on the number of bills that can be introduced, which would naturally have a dramatic impact on how responsive the legislature could be (and it's already slow). That would necessitate a more powerful executive to take up the slack. Is that what you want? A paralyzed legislative branch and a tyrant?
I don't like it anymore than the next guy, but I'm not so simple minded that I think you can hand wave it away as "they're just not doing their jobs".
The simple fact is that the US government is too big because the US itself is too big. If you want an efficient government you want a sovereign polis. Aristotle knew it, Machiavelli knew it, but the economic and military concerns have overridden any concern for a pure abstract efficient state. The state does not exist in a vacuum.
The only way to 'fix' the federal government would be to either fundamentally change it, say by imposing limits on the number of bills that could be written/sponsored in a session, or by completely dissolving it and letting the states become sovereign again (which are microcosms of the federal problem so that only partially ameliorates).
"Terrorism" does work sometimes. It got the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the French out of Algeria, to name but two. In fact many if not most revolutions contain a 'terrorist' component, but that label just happens to vanish if the revolution succeeds and consequently rewrites the history books making the deaths of innocents into political martyrs (which in Algeria especially was really the case, as the French orchestrated false flag terrorist attacks to undermine popular support for the local insurgency).
As for the rest, your post is tin foil hat nonsense. The President does not normally write laws (and any which he might would still have to be sponsored from committee to floor by a congressman), that's what executive orders are for. Further, congressmen, The President, cabinet members, etc. are all too busy to read most laws. That's not a secret. That's why they have a staff. Their staff researches proposed legislation, writes it, reads it, rewrites it, re-researches it, etc. and only briefs their superiors on key points. It's not a grand conspiracy, it's a simple adaptation to circumstances. There are too many bills which are too long for every congressman to read every one. Hell, many of the never make it out of committee, let alone pass a floor vote or actually get signed.
Oh but of course it's the evil, evil corporations who control everything! That's why the government was so unsuccessful at breaking up AT&T in the 80s... oh wait, it wasn't. Corporate interests are no less valid than the interests of an other institutions or individuals. They are a significant part of the economy and consequently the politics of that economy. I'm sick of all the anti-corporatism for anti-corporatism's sake. Everybody wants to ride the wagon and spit at it too.
Thanks for the redundancy so that you could spam some off-topic link. Why don't you take your spam to long dead posts on blogspot like all the other spammer assholes.
Do you really think that every minority interest group is going to be happy with the consensus of the majority all the time, every time? You talk about the 'principles of free software' as a panacea, ignoring that the free software movement has the same problems. Some person or minority of persons gets upset with decisions made by a larger group of core developers for a project, and what happens? Fork. The only way that government can fork is by 'segregating people' whether done by geography (which is the most logistically accommodating) or by some as-yet-untried model such as panarchism (which would be a logistical nightmare).
The fact about humans is that you can never please all of the people all of the time. No matter how reasonable a given consensus is, there will always be a minority that feels otherwise, and because there are always a few people playing without a full deck, an even smaller subset of a given minority may be emotional enough to think it's worth killing over. That's not a 'failure of democracy', that's life. Deal with it.
Yeah, that whole instant verbal translation thing is totally worthless. Who wants a universal translator anyway when we could just continue to live insular, uncultured, ignorant lives? Good plan.
Kurzweil has done more for human progress than you likely ever will. You're probably jealous and express that jealousy through baseless hatred. Have fun being a douche.
Canada is not a monolith. There are places in Canada where people say 'aboot' and consequently all Canada is mocked through them. Just as "American" accents are mocked through those prevalent in the Deep South, or the Valley Girl "dialect", when most of the country sounds like neither. (Being from Washington State, people sometimes think *I'm* Canadian, which happens to many who live in border states, though especially to those from ND, MN, WI, MI and ME.)
P.S. People who pronounce 'both' like 'bolth' need to be slapped until they stop. There is no goddamn 'L' in that word.