As the nuclear arms race back in the Cold War proved, making the Earth uninhabitable only once is hardly sufficient: You have to make the Earth uninhabitable 25 times over just to be sure.
The only real antidote is to go to live music performances to hear what they really sound like. I'd recommend that for people used to modern pop recordings too. I think many would be shocked to hear what they are missing in the horribly compressed and otherwise doctored up recordings that are sold today.
Except that at least for some acts lip-synching a la Milli Vanilli is now the rule rather than the exception, so depending on the group the live concert may just be a really loud playback.
I might be hit by a drunk driver. Should we require breathalyzer machines in all automobiles?
That's a very good idea, actually. Sure, it's annoyingly inconvenient, but given that thousands of people are killed by drunk drivers annually (and even larger numbers are injured) that might well be a worthwhile tradeoff.
And just so we're clear: If drunk driving only endangered your own life, I wouldn't be interested in stopping it. Just like if the only person you could kill with a gun was yourself, I wouldn't care. But that's not the case.
Seeing as how you're obviously not a gun owner, I'd say you have no business telling others what they do or do not need.
That seems like circular logic to me: You're saying that the only people who can argue about whether people should own guns are people who have already decided to own a gun. It's sort of like saying that the only people who can hold a legitimate opinion about the divinity of Jesus are Christians.
What's to stop criminals from continuing to do private sales of illegal firearms? Nothing.
Nothing except proper police work, you mean.
They [the government] have no business knowing.
The government has a clear interest in preventing its citizens from being murdered. Knowing who has large supplies of firearms with large capacity magazines would seem like it might help in that endeavor.
Why is it that the highest violent crime rates in the US of A are in cities with the strictest gun control laws? If/when you can find an explanation for that, I might reconsider my position on weapons.
Because that correlation doesn't necessarily mean that "strict gun control laws" => "high violent crime rates". It could mean "high violent crime rates" => "strict gun control laws". Or even "desperately poor population"=>"high violent crime" and "desperately poor population"=>"Democrats elected for other reasons"=>"strict gun control laws".
So that's two explanations. Are you reconsidering your position on weapons now?
Why would you move to Texas when you could just move to nearby New Hampshire? No sales tax, no income tax. Depending on where your employees live, they might not even have to move.
It is the insane attitudes towards each other that is causing them to not compromise.
No, it isn't. What's causing them to not compromise is: 1. A significant number of them got elected promising to never, ever, compromise. Their stated position on which their entire political career is based is "any deal other than us getting exactly what we want is worse for the country than no deal at all". 2. Large campaign donors have promised to bankroll serious and likely successful primary challenges against any candidate that makes a deal. So they know full well that to make a compromise is to kiss goodbye to all those staffers and the nice salary and various lobbying junkets and the guaranteed positions at lobby groups if they ever decide they don't want to deal with those pesky voters any longer.
It's self-interest that's causing them not to compromise, and as Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I argue there isn't a household in America that isn't running a deficit.
And your argument would be wrong, since my own household has no debt at all right now: no overdue bills, no student loans, no car loans, no mortgage, no credit cards. That's the problem with making universal statements: a single counterexample invalidates your argument. If you want to be accurate about it, what you want is the much looser statement "A majority of households in the US are currently in debt."
Also, as a sibling poster pointed out, there's a difference between "deficit" and "debt". A couple of examples that might help understand the difference: 1. In 1963, Mr and Mrs Jones took out a $20,000 mortgage and bought their first home. That was a really big debt at the time, but Mr Jones earned about $4,500 a year, but even with the mortgage they were spending only $3,700 a year and ran no deficit after that year. 2. Today, Mr Jones has retired, the house was paid off years ago, and the Joneses have $125,000 in assets earning $7,500 in investment income, and take in $24,000 in Social Security for a total income of $31,500. They're spending $35,000 a year now, and thus running a $3500 deficit. But they have no debt whatsoever.
It's the opinion of one politician who, at the time he expressed it, was the equivalent of the vice president in the US. He isn't some backbencher, he's the party leader of a major bloc in the Knesset. And he's no longer in that position not because of these kind of views, but because of a corruption and bribery scandal. For what it's worth, a (Jewish) friend of mine who went to Israel heard lots of talk among Israelis that thoroughly agreed with that basic view.
The opinion inside Israel, as far as I can tell, is shifting from accommodation of the Arabs to the realization that you won't ever be able to negotiate a permanent peace with people whose aim is to commit genocide on you.
That view is demonstrably untrue: Egypt and Jordan both have negotiated permanent peace agreements that have held up for quite some time, and Fatah (who like Hamas had dedicated themselves to destroying Israel) also no longer supports attacking Israel. Fatah's reward for being peaceful is continuously losing land to Israeli settlements.
There is agreement of the core doctrines of Islam, and Osama bin Laden was not an "extremists" (as you are continually lied to about) but is in the *mainstream* of Islamic ideology.
If Osama bin Laden was a mainstream view, why is it that he had about 2000 followers (CIA estimates) out of approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world? The argument "Well, not everyone who agrees with him joined Al Qaida" also doesn't hold up: If you figure that only one out of every 1000 people who agreed with bin Laden, that would mean that he had roughly 2 million supporters, which would mean that 99.88% of Muslims disagree with him. That would strongly indicate that his views were seen as unusual or extreme within Islam.
For reference, the actual core doctrines of Islam are: - Declaring faith in Allah and his prophet Mohammed. - Praying five times a day. - The giving of charity from personal income to local people in need. - Fasting during Ramadan. - A pilgrimage to Mecca. And in fact, these are the only bits that Muslims universally agree upon: almost everything else is subject to major arguments, most notably between the Sunni and Shia (who get along about as well as the Catholics and Protestants once did in Northern Ireland).
Populating Judea and Samaria with Israelis is not illegal under International Law because the territory is disputed.
"Judea and Samaria" is not a neutral term for the land in question: it has fairly recently been adopted by right-wing Israeli parties who believe that the proper borders of Israel include all of the West Bank and Gaza (the more extreme believe that the proper land of Israel includes the Sinai, all of Lebanon and Jordan, and about 2/3 of Syria, because the Torah clearly states that God grants Israel a country stretching from the Red Sea to the Euphrates.
As far as the relevant international law, Fourth Geneva Convention Article 49, states: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." International observers universally consider Israel to be an occupying power in the area conquered in 1967, including the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza. This article was created specifically to try to prevent invasions in order to gain lebensraum and alter the ethnic makeup of occupied territories, which is exactly what Israel is trying to do in the West Bank.
(Google the SkepticsAnnotatedQuran - it shows how false and evil that book is).
So's the Torah (read the Skeptic's Annotated Bible for more details). Religions change over time, which is why it's no longer seen as OK to sell your daughter into slavery or force a raped virgin to marry her rapist (unless she lives in a city and didn't scream loudly enough, in which case she's supposed to be stoned to death).
the moral actor (Israel)... and the evil actor (Hamas)
See, that to me is an indication that you aren't impartial about this. My general view on any kind of warfare is that if you ask side A, they'll be convinced that they're the moral actors and B is irredeemably evil, whereas if you ask side B, they're convinced that they're the moral actor and A is irredeemably evil.
As far as Hamas versus Israel goes, Hamas's charter specifically states that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth. I could see how you see that as irredeemably evil. On the other hand, prominent Israeli politicians (most notably Avigdor Lieberman, the Deputy PM only last year) have publicly made statements to the effect that the Palestinians should be wiped out. I could see how Palestinians see that as irredeemably evil. Also of great interest to me is that the militant Gaza hasn't shrunk whereas the basically peaceful West Bank Palestinians have been losing land to settlements steadily since about 1995, suggesting that Hamas' strategy could be seen as more effective in protecting their people's existence than Fatah's strategy.
Would I be correct in guessing you are Israeli or regularly read Israeli news sources?
Do you have any idea of how racist that sounds? as if Israelis can't report impartially, ever?
As I thought I made clear, it's hard for Israeli news sources to report impartially about conflicts that Israel is involved in, for the same reason that it's hard for American news sources to report impartially about conflicts that the US is involved in. The reason I figured you were Israeli or focused on Israeli news sources was because you seemed reasonably impartial except when discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict. Basically, I was advocating treating Israeli news sources with the same standard I treat American, British, Australian, German, etc news sources.
What you seem to be saying: All Muslims are irredeemably evil. Don't trust anything they say. Do everything in your power to kill as many of them as possible or they will destroy everything that you hold dear. If it seems like they've done something decent and nice, it's because they're trying to get you to lower your guard so they can destroy you and yours more easily. If it seems like they're victims of atrocities, that's their propaganda trying to get you to sympathize with them so you'll lower your guard and they can destroy you and yours more easily. This seems more than a tad bigoted to me.
In short, how are you so certain that the few news sources that agree with you are the unbiased ones, and everything else you encounter are the biased ones?
Why is Israel demonized? Is it something they have done or not done?
Here are some things Israel has done that are regularly used to criticize Israel in the "biased" media: Conquering territory and populating it with their own people (West Bank settlements), bombing civilian areas (Gaza and Beirut), attacking neutral ships in international waters (Turkish flotilla), preventing food and medicine from reaching Gaza, and in some cases discriminating against non-Jewish citizens. The historically minded will also make mention of the attack on the USS Liberty, and the forcing of Palestinians out of present day Israel shortly after Israel became a country.
It is because Islam *commands* the waging of war against unbelievers
The Torah, in several places, commands the Israelites to commit genocide against non-Israelites living in Canaan, and there are instances of God punishing the Israelites for failing to do so. Do modern-day Israelis follow those commandments, or not? If the answer is yes, then Israel can't claim the moral high ground based on their religious beliefs. If the answer is no, then ask yourself why you think that Judaism can ignore those kinds of commandments but Islam can't.
their reporting on their associate's child tragically killed in Gaza and accused the Israelis when in fact it was a Hamas rocket that killed her
Umm, citation needed on that. And it would hardly be surprising for a journalist to assume that explosives that strike in Gaza are much more likely to be Israeli than Hamas - Hamas firing rockets at Gaza makes about as much sense as the IDF firing explosives at Tel Aviv. I'm not suggesting Hamas are innocent here, just that they aren't that stupid.
If their whitewashing of Qur'an inspired terror is palatable to you then you are already a lost soul.
My experience of Al Jazeera's reporting on terrorism groups is that they aren't supporting the actions of terrorists, but are doing their best to report on the situation from their point of view. If you actually listen to what Osama bin Laden, Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Meshaal, etc say, you might learn something about how they see the world, why they're doing what they're doing, and why they have significant numbers of people supporting them.
Would I be correct in guessing you are Israeli or regularly read Israeli news sources? If so, I think it's worth mentioning that in my experience the least accurate reporting on a war or conflict comes from news agencies who are based in countries that make up one side or the other of that war. In other words, I wouldn't expect to see accurate reporting from Haaretz on the Hamas-Israeli fighting a few months ago for the same reason I didn't trust the reporting from the New York Times on the Iraq War.
And yellow journalism has been around as long as there have been newspapers.
Actually, since before there were newspapers, and before there was really such a thing as a "journalist": There's a lot of opinion and lurid stories that were probably just made up in Thucydides, Plutarch, Suetonius, etc.
Let us get every website using HTTPS, every email and IM conversation encrypted.
What makes you so certain the NSA hasn't cracked SSL? Because I'm reasonably certain that if they had broken SSL, they wouldn't tell anyone about that capability.
GGP's point seemed to have been that some people marked down as Christians weren't really devout Christians. My counterpoint was that some people marked down as atheists aren't really devout atheists either, so that arguing that non-devout people were skewing the statistics didn't seem valid.
My general impression is that in Europe, the US, and Canada, the trend is that people's religious views are becoming a less significant part of their personal identity and more of an occasional interest or cultural affiliation. The exception is those in the US who's religious views are focused on the concepts of authority and obedience that are really scared that their worldview is dying.
Drugs besides alcohol and prescribed pills are illegal because they circumvent a distribution apparatus.
That's not the reason why drugs are illegal. Harry Anslinger, who led the effort to outlaw pot in the 1930's, explained his motivations: "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."
That why the drugs favored by white people back in the day (tobacco and alcohol) are legal, but the drugs favored by non-white people at the same time (marijuana, opiates) are illegal.
The next major round of prohibitions was very explicitly because Richard Nixon wanted an excuse to lock up the hippies, who he saw as a threat to America.
Not having a pension from an employer is in fact quite common in the US. Also not uncommon is cases where people were supposed to have a pension from an employer, but the employer in question raided the pension fund on its way to not existing any longer, so the pension doesn't exist.
Social Security is a state pension program, as you gathered. It's not exactly enough to live on, as the parent post demonstrates, and right now about half of the politicians in Washington DC want to get rid of it entirely on the grounds that it's too expensive. There are three kinds of accounts specifically set up to try to encourage personal retirement savings (IRA, Roth IRA, and 401(k)), and there are some tax advantages to using them, but those are only an option for the minority of people who earn enough to afford to save anything.
So yes, retirees in the US are very much like pensioners in the UK, except that US retirees have it much worse than pensioners. Also, the conservative party in the US, who holds more than half of the seats in Congress, wants elderly to get nothing at all when they retire.
According to polls on the subject, atheism / agnosticism / unaffiliated / non-religious is the third largest (non-)religious view in the world, after Christianity and Islam.
I agree that many self-identified Christians aren't exactly devout e.g. most Catholics in the US use birth control. But by the same token, self-identified atheists have been known to get married in a church or ask for a minister on their deathbed.
My basic take on the issue: As long as nobody is coercing other people into or out of religion, and as long as the group in question isn't hurting anybody, I don't have a problem with it. So far, nearly every religious viewpoint has used coercion or violence at some point in their history, atheists included.
Once the freeloaders exceed 50% of the vote... they will simply use the power of the government... to steal from the rest of the productive population.
We're in no danger of that, because there's nothing true about that sentence: 1. Only 17% of households pay no income and no payroll tax. As soon as you factor in Social Security and Medicare, there are very few freeloaders.
2. Of those 17%, nearly all pay sales taxes and/or property taxes to state and local governments, and many pay federal gasoline taxes, cigarette taxes, and other federal sales taxes. In other words, they aren't freeloaders.
3. Your population of "freeloaders" basically consists of: Retirees, students, and seriously disabled people. Almost all of them either paid taxes before they became "freeloaders", or will pay taxes in the future.
Also relevant to this discussion: The median wage in the United States is $32,700. That means that half the country is earning less than that. If you're like a lot of/.ers and are a college-educated person working in technology, you should understand that your experience of life in America is nothing like what the majority of Americans experience. You are probably earning twice what the average American earns. You probably have quite a lot of disposable income and may have significant net worth. The average American family has negative savings and buys very little that isn't absolutely necessary to survive (food, clothing, housing, medical care, transportation, utilities).
The reasons you might not be aware of these disparities are: - You probably live far away from the people who earn a lot less than you, so you don't see how people like that live. - You probably don't interact with people who earn a lot less than you on a regular basis. Or if you do, you see them as (for example) "that guy behind the fast food counter" or "the woman who cleans my office", rather than as flesh-and-blood people just like you. - Media do not regularly portray people in that economic situation.
The Vietnam War was, in every respect, a bipartisan effort. The seeds of it were planted by Harry Truman, Eisenhower continued it with the "advisors", JFK and LBJ ramped it up, and Richard Nixon expanded it to 2 other countries. Congress never really tried to shut it down.
The most prominent politician in either major party who opposed the Vietnam War when it was happening was Eugene McCarthy, who ran in the 1968 Democratic Primary specifically to try to stop it, and lost.
... and I don't know how many of our South Vietnamese allies.
And Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians. Can't forget them: Even in modern wars fought by armies that are specifically barred from killing civilians, a lot of civilians die.
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As the nuclear arms race back in the Cold War proved, making the Earth uninhabitable only once is hardly sufficient: You have to make the Earth uninhabitable 25 times over just to be sure.
The only real antidote is to go to live music performances to hear what they really sound like. I'd recommend that for people used to modern pop recordings too. I think many would be shocked to hear what they are missing in the horribly compressed and otherwise doctored up recordings that are sold today.
Except that at least for some acts lip-synching a la Milli Vanilli is now the rule rather than the exception, so depending on the group the live concert may just be a really loud playback.
I might be hit by a drunk driver. Should we require breathalyzer machines in all automobiles?
That's a very good idea, actually. Sure, it's annoyingly inconvenient, but given that thousands of people are killed by drunk drivers annually (and even larger numbers are injured) that might well be a worthwhile tradeoff.
And just so we're clear: If drunk driving only endangered your own life, I wouldn't be interested in stopping it. Just like if the only person you could kill with a gun was yourself, I wouldn't care. But that's not the case.
Seeing as how you're obviously not a gun owner, I'd say you have no business telling others what they do or do not need.
That seems like circular logic to me: You're saying that the only people who can argue about whether people should own guns are people who have already decided to own a gun. It's sort of like saying that the only people who can hold a legitimate opinion about the divinity of Jesus are Christians.
What's to stop criminals from continuing to do private sales of illegal firearms? Nothing.
Nothing except proper police work, you mean.
They [the government] have no business knowing.
The government has a clear interest in preventing its citizens from being murdered. Knowing who has large supplies of firearms with large capacity magazines would seem like it might help in that endeavor.
Why is it that the highest violent crime rates in the US of A are in cities with the strictest gun control laws? If/when you can find an explanation for that, I might reconsider my position on weapons.
Because that correlation doesn't necessarily mean that "strict gun control laws" => "high violent crime rates". It could mean "high violent crime rates" => "strict gun control laws". Or even "desperately poor population"=>"high violent crime" and "desperately poor population"=>"Democrats elected for other reasons"=>"strict gun control laws".
So that's two explanations. Are you reconsidering your position on weapons now?
Why would you move to Texas when you could just move to nearby New Hampshire? No sales tax, no income tax. Depending on where your employees live, they might not even have to move.
It is the insane attitudes towards each other that is causing them to not compromise.
No, it isn't. What's causing them to not compromise is:
1. A significant number of them got elected promising to never, ever, compromise. Their stated position on which their entire political career is based is "any deal other than us getting exactly what we want is worse for the country than no deal at all".
2. Large campaign donors have promised to bankroll serious and likely successful primary challenges against any candidate that makes a deal. So they know full well that to make a compromise is to kiss goodbye to all those staffers and the nice salary and various lobbying junkets and the guaranteed positions at lobby groups if they ever decide they don't want to deal with those pesky voters any longer.
It's self-interest that's causing them not to compromise, and as Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I argue there isn't a household in America that isn't running a deficit.
And your argument would be wrong, since my own household has no debt at all right now: no overdue bills, no student loans, no car loans, no mortgage, no credit cards. That's the problem with making universal statements: a single counterexample invalidates your argument. If you want to be accurate about it, what you want is the much looser statement "A majority of households in the US are currently in debt."
Also, as a sibling poster pointed out, there's a difference between "deficit" and "debt". A couple of examples that might help understand the difference:
1. In 1963, Mr and Mrs Jones took out a $20,000 mortgage and bought their first home. That was a really big debt at the time, but Mr Jones earned about $4,500 a year, but even with the mortgage they were spending only $3,700 a year and ran no deficit after that year.
2. Today, Mr Jones has retired, the house was paid off years ago, and the Joneses have $125,000 in assets earning $7,500 in investment income, and take in $24,000 in Social Security for a total income of $31,500. They're spending $35,000 a year now, and thus running a $3500 deficit. But they have no debt whatsoever.
Me too!
It is the opinion of one politician.
It's the opinion of one politician who, at the time he expressed it, was the equivalent of the vice president in the US. He isn't some backbencher, he's the party leader of a major bloc in the Knesset. And he's no longer in that position not because of these kind of views, but because of a corruption and bribery scandal. For what it's worth, a (Jewish) friend of mine who went to Israel heard lots of talk among Israelis that thoroughly agreed with that basic view.
The opinion inside Israel, as far as I can tell, is shifting from accommodation of the Arabs to the realization that you won't ever be able to negotiate a permanent peace with people whose aim is to commit genocide on you.
That view is demonstrably untrue: Egypt and Jordan both have negotiated permanent peace agreements that have held up for quite some time, and Fatah (who like Hamas had dedicated themselves to destroying Israel) also no longer supports attacking Israel. Fatah's reward for being peaceful is continuously losing land to Israeli settlements.
There is agreement of the core doctrines of Islam, and Osama bin Laden was not an "extremists" (as you are continually lied to about) but is in the *mainstream* of Islamic ideology.
If Osama bin Laden was a mainstream view, why is it that he had about 2000 followers (CIA estimates) out of approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world? The argument "Well, not everyone who agrees with him joined Al Qaida" also doesn't hold up: If you figure that only one out of every 1000 people who agreed with bin Laden, that would mean that he had roughly 2 million supporters, which would mean that 99.88% of Muslims disagree with him. That would strongly indicate that his views were seen as unusual or extreme within Islam.
For reference, the actual core doctrines of Islam are:
- Declaring faith in Allah and his prophet Mohammed.
- Praying five times a day.
- The giving of charity from personal income to local people in need.
- Fasting during Ramadan.
- A pilgrimage to Mecca.
And in fact, these are the only bits that Muslims universally agree upon: almost everything else is subject to major arguments, most notably between the Sunni and Shia (who get along about as well as the Catholics and Protestants once did in Northern Ireland).
Populating Judea and Samaria with Israelis is not illegal under International Law because the territory is disputed.
"Judea and Samaria" is not a neutral term for the land in question: it has fairly recently been adopted by right-wing Israeli parties who believe that the proper borders of Israel include all of the West Bank and Gaza (the more extreme believe that the proper land of Israel includes the Sinai, all of Lebanon and Jordan, and about 2/3 of Syria, because the Torah clearly states that God grants Israel a country stretching from the Red Sea to the Euphrates.
As far as the relevant international law, Fourth Geneva Convention Article 49, states:
"The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
International observers universally consider Israel to be an occupying power in the area conquered in 1967, including the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza. This article was created specifically to try to prevent invasions in order to gain lebensraum and alter the ethnic makeup of occupied territories, which is exactly what Israel is trying to do in the West Bank.
(Google the SkepticsAnnotatedQuran - it shows how false and evil that book is).
So's the Torah (read the Skeptic's Annotated Bible for more details). Religions change over time, which is why it's no longer seen as OK to sell your daughter into slavery or force a raped virgin to marry her rapist (unless she lives in a city and didn't scream loudly enough, in which case she's supposed to be stoned to death).
the moral actor (Israel) ... and the evil actor (Hamas)
See, that to me is an indication that you aren't impartial about this. My general view on any kind of warfare is that if you ask side A, they'll be convinced that they're the moral actors and B is irredeemably evil, whereas if you ask side B, they're convinced that they're the moral actor and A is irredeemably evil.
As far as Hamas versus Israel goes, Hamas's charter specifically states that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth. I could see how you see that as irredeemably evil. On the other hand, prominent Israeli politicians (most notably Avigdor Lieberman, the Deputy PM only last year) have publicly made statements to the effect that the Palestinians should be wiped out. I could see how Palestinians see that as irredeemably evil. Also of great interest to me is that the militant Gaza hasn't shrunk whereas the basically peaceful West Bank Palestinians have been losing land to settlements steadily since about 1995, suggesting that Hamas' strategy could be seen as more effective in protecting their people's existence than Fatah's strategy.
Would I be correct in guessing you are Israeli or regularly read Israeli news sources?
Do you have any idea of how racist that sounds? as if Israelis can't report impartially, ever?
As I thought I made clear, it's hard for Israeli news sources to report impartially about conflicts that Israel is involved in, for the same reason that it's hard for American news sources to report impartially about conflicts that the US is involved in. The reason I figured you were Israeli or focused on Israeli news sources was because you seemed reasonably impartial except when discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict. Basically, I was advocating treating Israeli news sources with the same standard I treat American, British, Australian, German, etc news sources.
What you seem to be saying: All Muslims are irredeemably evil. Don't trust anything they say. Do everything in your power to kill as many of them as possible or they will destroy everything that you hold dear. If it seems like they've done something decent and nice, it's because they're trying to get you to lower your guard so they can destroy you and yours more easily. If it seems like they're victims of atrocities, that's their propaganda trying to get you to sympathize with them so you'll lower your guard and they can destroy you and yours more easily. This seems more than a tad bigoted to me.
In short, how are you so certain that the few news sources that agree with you are the unbiased ones, and everything else you encounter are the biased ones?
Why is Israel demonized? Is it something they have done or not done?
Here are some things Israel has done that are regularly used to criticize Israel in the "biased" media: Conquering territory and populating it with their own people (West Bank settlements), bombing civilian areas (Gaza and Beirut), attacking neutral ships in international waters (Turkish flotilla), preventing food and medicine from reaching Gaza, and in some cases discriminating against non-Jewish citizens. The historically minded will also make mention of the attack on the USS Liberty, and the forcing of Palestinians out of present day Israel shortly after Israel became a country.
It is because Islam *commands* the waging of war against unbelievers
The Torah, in several places, commands the Israelites to commit genocide against non-Israelites living in Canaan, and there are instances of God punishing the Israelites for failing to do so. Do modern-day Israelis follow those commandments, or not? If the answer is yes, then Israel can't claim the moral high ground based on their religious beliefs. If the answer is no, then ask yourself why you think that Judaism can ignore those kinds of commandments but Islam can't.
their reporting on their associate's child tragically killed in Gaza and accused the Israelis when in fact it was a Hamas rocket that killed her
Umm, citation needed on that. And it would hardly be surprising for a journalist to assume that explosives that strike in Gaza are much more likely to be Israeli than Hamas - Hamas firing rockets at Gaza makes about as much sense as the IDF firing explosives at Tel Aviv. I'm not suggesting Hamas are innocent here, just that they aren't that stupid.
If their whitewashing of Qur'an inspired terror is palatable to you then you are already a lost soul.
My experience of Al Jazeera's reporting on terrorism groups is that they aren't supporting the actions of terrorists, but are doing their best to report on the situation from their point of view. If you actually listen to what Osama bin Laden, Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Meshaal, etc say, you might learn something about how they see the world, why they're doing what they're doing, and why they have significant numbers of people supporting them.
Would I be correct in guessing you are Israeli or regularly read Israeli news sources? If so, I think it's worth mentioning that in my experience the least accurate reporting on a war or conflict comes from news agencies who are based in countries that make up one side or the other of that war. In other words, I wouldn't expect to see accurate reporting from Haaretz on the Hamas-Israeli fighting a few months ago for the same reason I didn't trust the reporting from the New York Times on the Iraq War.
And yellow journalism has been around as long as there have been newspapers.
Actually, since before there were newspapers, and before there was really such a thing as a "journalist": There's a lot of opinion and lurid stories that were probably just made up in Thucydides, Plutarch, Suetonius, etc.
Let us get every website using HTTPS, every email and IM conversation encrypted.
What makes you so certain the NSA hasn't cracked SSL? Because I'm reasonably certain that if they had broken SSL, they wouldn't tell anyone about that capability.
So what you're saying is that it's really the 19.9808548034th anniversary?
GGP's point seemed to have been that some people marked down as Christians weren't really devout Christians. My counterpoint was that some people marked down as atheists aren't really devout atheists either, so that arguing that non-devout people were skewing the statistics didn't seem valid.
My general impression is that in Europe, the US, and Canada, the trend is that people's religious views are becoming a less significant part of their personal identity and more of an occasional interest or cultural affiliation. The exception is those in the US who's religious views are focused on the concepts of authority and obedience that are really scared that their worldview is dying.
Drugs besides alcohol and prescribed pills are illegal because they circumvent a distribution apparatus.
That's not the reason why drugs are illegal. Harry Anslinger, who led the effort to outlaw pot in the 1930's, explained his motivations:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."
That why the drugs favored by white people back in the day (tobacco and alcohol) are legal, but the drugs favored by non-white people at the same time (marijuana, opiates) are illegal.
The next major round of prohibitions was very explicitly because Richard Nixon wanted an excuse to lock up the hippies, who he saw as a threat to America.
Not having a pension from an employer is in fact quite common in the US. Also not uncommon is cases where people were supposed to have a pension from an employer, but the employer in question raided the pension fund on its way to not existing any longer, so the pension doesn't exist.
Social Security is a state pension program, as you gathered. It's not exactly enough to live on, as the parent post demonstrates, and right now about half of the politicians in Washington DC want to get rid of it entirely on the grounds that it's too expensive. There are three kinds of accounts specifically set up to try to encourage personal retirement savings (IRA, Roth IRA, and 401(k)), and there are some tax advantages to using them, but those are only an option for the minority of people who earn enough to afford to save anything.
So yes, retirees in the US are very much like pensioners in the UK, except that US retirees have it much worse than pensioners. Also, the conservative party in the US, who holds more than half of the seats in Congress, wants elderly to get nothing at all when they retire.
According to polls on the subject, atheism / agnosticism / unaffiliated / non-religious is the third largest (non-)religious view in the world, after Christianity and Islam.
I agree that many self-identified Christians aren't exactly devout e.g. most Catholics in the US use birth control. But by the same token, self-identified atheists have been known to get married in a church or ask for a minister on their deathbed.
My basic take on the issue: As long as nobody is coercing other people into or out of religion, and as long as the group in question isn't hurting anybody, I don't have a problem with it. So far, nearly every religious viewpoint has used coercion or violence at some point in their history, atheists included.
Once the freeloaders exceed 50% of the vote ... they will simply use the power of the government ... to steal from the rest of the productive population.
We're in no danger of that, because there's nothing true about that sentence:
1. Only 17% of households pay no income and no payroll tax. As soon as you factor in Social Security and Medicare, there are very few freeloaders.
2. Of those 17%, nearly all pay sales taxes and/or property taxes to state and local governments, and many pay federal gasoline taxes, cigarette taxes, and other federal sales taxes. In other words, they aren't freeloaders.
3. Your population of "freeloaders" basically consists of: Retirees, students, and seriously disabled people. Almost all of them either paid taxes before they became "freeloaders", or will pay taxes in the future.
Also relevant to this discussion: The median wage in the United States is $32,700. That means that half the country is earning less than that. If you're like a lot of /.ers and are a college-educated person working in technology, you should understand that your experience of life in America is nothing like what the majority of Americans experience. You are probably earning twice what the average American earns. You probably have quite a lot of disposable income and may have significant net worth. The average American family has negative savings and buys very little that isn't absolutely necessary to survive (food, clothing, housing, medical care, transportation, utilities).
The reasons you might not be aware of these disparities are:
- You probably live far away from the people who earn a lot less than you, so you don't see how people like that live.
- You probably don't interact with people who earn a lot less than you on a regular basis. Or if you do, you see them as (for example) "that guy behind the fast food counter" or "the woman who cleans my office", rather than as flesh-and-blood people just like you.
- Media do not regularly portray people in that economic situation.
It's apparently just talking about them that is offensive? If we just look the other way and pretend they don't exist, then everything is peachy?
It's a common defense mechanism for people who have done things that they would probably consider morally evil: pretend they never happened.
And it's also been associated with good: the traditional choice of colour for the clergy is black robes.
Umm, I don't think you're supporting your own argument very well here, given what's been going on in the Catholic church recently.
The Vietnam War was, in every respect, a bipartisan effort. The seeds of it were planted by Harry Truman, Eisenhower continued it with the "advisors", JFK and LBJ ramped it up, and Richard Nixon expanded it to 2 other countries. Congress never really tried to shut it down.
The most prominent politician in either major party who opposed the Vietnam War when it was happening was Eugene McCarthy, who ran in the 1968 Democratic Primary specifically to try to stop it, and lost.
... and I don't know how many of our South Vietnamese allies.
And Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians. Can't forget them: Even in modern wars fought by armies that are specifically barred from killing civilians, a lot of civilians die.