The mainstream media had (IMHO thankfully) a bit of a hate-on for Bush
Uh, bullshit. They let him get away with the invasion of Iraq with nary a peep.
If the Bush administration handled, say, the whole Benghazi incident exactly the same way our current administration had, would there or would there not be calls for impeachment from the likes of CNBC (as there were very loudly during much of Bush's latter years in office)?
CNBC is no more the "mainstream media" than Fox is. Both are partisan entertainment complexes. But that aside, while Benghazi may have been incompetently handled, it's nowhere near an impeachable offense.
We'd get rid of the indefinite detentions too, if the Congress would let us. Any time the current administration has tried to close Guantanimo, the Republicans make a huge political stink about it.
Obama's goal has never been to end indefinite detention. He wants to move it somewhere else.
He could use his power as commander-in-chief to open the cages and close Gitmo tomorrow. The Constitution's guarantee of due process requires him to do so if Congress won't let him bring accused people to trial.
No, it's not. The whole question is mis-asked. Raymond Smullyan's piece Is God A Taoist? has the best explanation I've seen:
Mortal:
What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!
God:
You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.
Mortal:
So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?
God:
It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.
Guns, by themselves, are not a threat to your well-being.
If you mean "criminals with guns", if you live outside of areas of chronic poverty where gang violence is common, and if you're neither a violent criminal nor and an associate of violent criminals, "criminals with guns" are not much of a threat to your well-being compared to "cars, cancer, heart disease, and governments that mess it up". No more so than in comparable nations.
The problem is that, thanks to racism and economic injustice, we have more areas of chronic poverty where gang violence is common than comparable nations.
The US government doesn't have any special obligations with regards to not stabbing every non-American in the world with a pencil,
Pardon me for not performing an exhaustive search, but I'm pretty sure that it would be a violation of some treaty or other for the U.S. to go stab every non-American in the world with a pencil. So there is an obligation, though not one directly sourced from the Constitution.
Tell me, what is rule #1 of computing? "Always keep a backup".
For the next 100,000,000 years at least, there are no circumstances under which the surface or near surface of the Earth will be more hostile to survival than space. You've got gravity, water, building material, air...far more practical to build those "backups" in underground or undersea bunkers.
It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good
...never mind that, measured by the tax burden as a percentage of GDP, that "big government" was the smallest it had been in a long time. Teabagger protests were about Obamacare and taxes, about which their complaints were factually wrong, not about civil liberties.
What got the "Tea Party" started was a toxic brew of ignorance, racism, and astroturf. What's kept it going has been mostly ignorance and racism; many of the astroturfers who got it going have realized what a monster they unleashed and distanced themselves from it.
In any case, Fox is a private broadcaster who makes their money off advertising sales. They're not a public broadcaster.
...except, of course, for their reliance on the public infrastructure of government to keep others from making unauthorized use of their signal or the information contained therein (i.e., the rebroadcast and copyright issues at stake here), and to keep others from sending out photons in the radio band in the frequencies they "own" (FCC regulations). Fox is quite reliant on your tax dollars, even if it's in a somewhat indirect manner.
The only way for socialism to work is via big government because it requires that the government take-to-give.
No, it doesn't. Anarchists are socialists. Forget the red scare bullshit you've been fed by the American right and go read about Proudhon and Goldman and Kropotkin and Bakunin.
Which would be..what, in this case? Equal creation by men and women? Or the previous, evidenceless and sexist assumption that "men must have done this"?
There's something deeply evolutionary to that:
If by "evolutionary" you mean "bullshitish justifications of our society's gender roles as biologically determined truths", yes.
Don't forget that it was the federal government that codified slavery and segregation in the first place.
Slavery existed well before the federal government. And I'm pretty sure there were a number of laws about it, thus it was codified well before the Constitution.
The ahistoricism of modern anti-federalists continues to amaze me.
The USPTO, for example, is established in the US Constitution
No. No, it's not. The power -- not the obligation -- to issue patents and copyrights is established in the Constitution, but the USPTO is no more established there than any agency carrying out any other power of Congress.
You know that the U.S. Constitution really hasn't mattered ever since Lincoln wiped his ass with it and went to war with half the nation, right?
Strange history you've got there.
First, Lincoln fought -- and crushed -- a pro-slavery domestic terrorist group. The so-called "Confederacy" fired first. It was -- ahistorical right-wing fantasies aside -- not a group of citizens resisting government oppression, but a gang of violent terrorists using force to ensure the continuation of slavery. If you want to see armed citizens justly resisting government, look to the civil rights era, to the Deacons for Defense and the Black Panthers.
Second, politicians wiping their ass with the Constitution long pre-dates Lincoln. Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts were signed in 1798, just a few years after the Bill of Rights was ratified.
For example, look at like 99% of the federal laws that rely on the Commerce Clause as their justification for existence.
The irony of saying "People can't be free if people are allowed to infringe on the freedom of others", while insisting people can be forced to associate with those they don't want to, is lost on so many people.
No one is being "forced to associate with those they don't want to". Property, markets, trade, and commerce are a creation of society and governments; if you want to play the commerce game, part of the ante our society and government levies is leashing any bigotry you might have.
But if bigotry is more important to someone, they can choose to not play that game. If they don't want the damned in their store, a simple solution: close the store. Buy a couple acres in BFN and be a subsistence farmer and they can avoid having to deal with all those . Better yet, we won't have to deal with them. Win/win.
And yet our photo albums and history are filled with incredibly sharp photos that were shot on film.
Selection bias. When sharing photos was expensive, only incredibly sharp photos were shared. Digital photo-taking developed with digital photo-sharing, cheap and easy.
...but the tone of the comment, when looked at in its entirety, was one of, "Only professionals should be using this stuff," meaning the OP doesn't believe non-professionals should be allowed to use the equipment.
No. No, it did not have that tone at all. Your reading is an enormous stretch, and does not mean that at all, and unbiased native speakers of English will not interpret it the way you have. I don't know if English is a second language for you or if you same some bias here, but your reading is not accurate.
The comment was no different than telling someone about to spend $5,000 on a PC that only hardcore gamers or media composers should spend that sort of money, that if you're just web surfing and writing an occasional paper something much less expensive will suit your needs. Absolutely no intent to institute some legal restriction can be inferred from such advice.
In which case maybe the schools should take a small step back, and teach those paradigms first.
Which is what teachers are having to do, rather than teach the actual material. And being math, reading, science, etc. teachers, not consumer electronics customer support techs, they're not really prepared to do so. So plenty of time and energy is wasted.
If you don't like it don't buy it. Enough with the stupid fucking boycotts that are nothing but attempts at silencing free speech.
You're not making any sense. A boycott is nothing but a large group of people saying "we don't like it, so we're not buying it." Boycotts (and buycotts) are an exercise in free speech and free markets. It is antiboycott laws (such as the blatantly unconstitutional one the U.S. has to squash criticism of Israel) that are attempts at silencing free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, bullshit. They let him get away with the invasion of Iraq with nary a peep.
CNBC is no more the "mainstream media" than Fox is. Both are partisan entertainment complexes. But that aside, while Benghazi may have been incompetently handled, it's nowhere near an impeachable offense.
Obama's goal has never been to end indefinite detention. He wants to move it somewhere else.
He could use his power as commander-in-chief to open the cages and close Gitmo tomorrow. The Constitution's guarantee of due process requires him to do so if Congress won't let him bring accused people to trial.
As opposed to the imperialism of western, mostly Christian nations, which is noted for sending women in their 50s off to invade other countries.
The use of young men as cannon fodder is unrelated to polygamous religion.
Some of the 9/11 hijackers were married. Some had been to college. Most were middle-class.
But don't let facts get in the way of your ignorant Islamophobia.
No, it's not. The whole question is mis-asked. Raymond Smullyan's piece Is God A Taoist? has the best explanation I've seen:
Since spoofing e-mail is trivial, sounds like anyone can send funds from your bank account..
That discussion is about an older version of the TrueCrypt license. While the newer version hasn't been submitted for OSI certification, some say it does meet the Open Source Definition.
Guns, by themselves, are not a threat to your well-being.
If you mean "criminals with guns", if you live outside of areas of chronic poverty where gang violence is common, and if you're neither a violent criminal nor and an associate of violent criminals, "criminals with guns" are not much of a threat to your well-being compared to "cars, cancer, heart disease, and governments that mess it up". No more so than in comparable nations.
The problem is that, thanks to racism and economic injustice, we have more areas of chronic poverty where gang violence is common than comparable nations.
Pardon me for not performing an exhaustive search, but I'm pretty sure that it would be a violation of some treaty or other for the U.S. to go stab every non-American in the world with a pencil. So there is an obligation, though not one directly sourced from the Constitution.
For the next 100,000,000 years at least, there are no circumstances under which the surface or near surface of the Earth will be more hostile to survival than space. You've got gravity, water, building material, air...far more practical to build those "backups" in underground or undersea bunkers.
...never mind that, measured by the tax burden as a percentage of GDP, that "big government" was the smallest it had been in a long time. Teabagger protests were about Obamacare and taxes, about which their complaints were factually wrong, not about civil liberties.
What got the "Tea Party" started was a toxic brew of ignorance, racism, and astroturf. What's kept it going has been mostly ignorance and racism; many of the astroturfers who got it going have realized what a monster they unleashed and distanced themselves from it.
Not true.
But...but...we're Exceptional! God Loves Us! The American Empire will last forever! It's our Manifest Destiny!
(Tongue-in-cheek, but too many of my fellow Americans think that way.)
...except, of course, for their reliance on the public infrastructure of government to keep others from making unauthorized use of their signal or the information contained therein (i.e., the rebroadcast and copyright issues at stake here), and to keep others from sending out photons in the radio band in the frequencies they "own" (FCC regulations). Fox is quite reliant on your tax dollars, even if it's in a somewhat indirect manner.
No, it doesn't. Anarchists are socialists. Forget the red scare bullshit you've been fed by the American right and go read about Proudhon and Goldman and Kropotkin and Bakunin.
Please...the entire state of Israel is an occupation of stolen territory. The theft may now be a fait accompli, but until we acknowlege that the Balfour Declaration, and the subsequent actions by the British Empire to build a Jewish state on stolen Arab territory for its own geopolitical purposes, was a crime against humanity, we're not going to make any progress sorting out the mess.
Which would be..what, in this case? Equal creation by men and women? Or the previous, evidenceless and sexist assumption that "men must have done this"?
If by "evolutionary" you mean "bullshitish justifications of our society's gender roles as biologically determined truths", yes.
Slavery existed well before the federal government. And I'm pretty sure there were a number of laws about it, thus it was codified well before the Constitution.
The ahistoricism of modern anti-federalists continues to amaze me.
TFA claims:
No. No, it's not. The power -- not the obligation -- to issue patents and copyrights is established in the Constitution, but the USPTO is no more established there than any agency carrying out any other power of Congress.
Strange history you've got there.
First, Lincoln fought -- and crushed -- a pro-slavery domestic terrorist group. The so-called "Confederacy" fired first. It was -- ahistorical right-wing fantasies aside -- not a group of citizens resisting government oppression, but a gang of violent terrorists using force to ensure the continuation of slavery. If you want to see armed citizens justly resisting government, look to the civil rights era, to the Deacons for Defense and the Black Panthers.
Second, politicians wiping their ass with the Constitution long pre-dates Lincoln. Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts were signed in 1798, just a few years after the Bill of Rights was ratified.
The federal government was intended to have strong powers over commerce, so that's entirely appropriate. Madison's "original intent" was a federal government with more power over commerce and taxation than the British Parliament had had, and that would take such power away from the states.
No one is being "forced to associate with those they don't want to". Property, markets, trade, and commerce are a creation of society and governments; if you want to play the commerce game, part of the ante our society and government levies is leashing any bigotry you might have.
But if bigotry is more important to someone, they can choose to not play that game. If they don't want the damned in their store, a simple solution: close the store. Buy a couple acres in BFN and be a subsistence farmer and they can avoid having to deal with all those . Better yet, we won't have to deal with them. Win/win.
Selection bias. When sharing photos was expensive, only incredibly sharp photos were shared. Digital photo-taking developed with digital photo-sharing, cheap and easy.
No. No, it did not have that tone at all. Your reading is an enormous stretch, and does not mean that at all, and unbiased native speakers of English will not interpret it the way you have. I don't know if English is a second language for you or if you same some bias here, but your reading is not accurate.
The comment was no different than telling someone about to spend $5,000 on a PC that only hardcore gamers or media composers should spend that sort of money, that if you're just web surfing and writing an occasional paper something much less expensive will suit your needs. Absolutely no intent to institute some legal restriction can be inferred from such advice.
Which is what teachers are having to do, rather than teach the actual material. And being math, reading, science, etc. teachers, not consumer electronics customer support techs, they're not really prepared to do so. So plenty of time and energy is wasted.
Disagreement is taking an opposing intellectual position. Homophobia, like other forms of bigotry, is not an intellectual position.
It is not necessarily a fear -- it is often misleading to attempt to figure out the meaning of a word by looking at its to etymology.
You're not making any sense. A boycott is nothing but a large group of people saying "we don't like it, so we're not buying it." Boycotts (and buycotts) are an exercise in free speech and free markets. It is antiboycott laws (such as the blatantly unconstitutional one the U.S. has to squash criticism of Israel) that are attempts at silencing free speech.