The US government violated lots of treaties with the natives the moment it became profitable to do so. Under US law, it was apparently acceptable. That doesn't make it right.
Why do people keep saying "the narrative" like there was only one? Why does it seem like people who talk about "the narrative" select one that makes their opponents look bad?
So far, I've gotten the most flak from my attitude that Islam isn't an inherently bad religion (although the worst flak came from my belief that people can change and deserve second chances). I'm aware that this is anecdotal evidence, but it's the best evidence anyone has brought up in this thread about who you can badmouth. There is this mysterious belief among people that they're being especially picked on.
I haven't seen much in the way of leftists hating whites, although there are some cases. Leftists tend to dislike the current social structure that favors white men, and often talk up things people who are not white men have accomplished, to try to balance out white culture and history.
The leftist attitude towards Christianity is largely about how Christianity presents itself. The loudest Christians in the US tend to be the intolerant irrational fundamentalist types, and if you look in the right places you will find other Christians blasting them. Many leftists don't notice the other side of Christianity, which is why I wind up defending Christianity in various places, and I'm not Christian.
In what sense is it open season on Christianity in the US? I hear complaints about how Christians are persecuted, and they usually wind up being cases where Christianity, or at least the complainer's idea of Christianity, isn't the preferred religion, or cases where the so-called Christians are using their religion as an excuse to be assholes. Other complaints amount to "they're saying mean things about us", and I'm not impressed.
Obviously, this doesn't apply everywhere in the world, but it appears to be true in the US.
Christianity covers a large number of very different people, and Christians say unpleasant things about each other.
In the meantime, I see lots and lots of vituperation directed as Islam and Muslims, so whoever "they" are, "they" aren't stopping criticism of other religions.
Historically, in the US, the usual result of some white guy finding a commercial use for ground the natives consider sacred is bulldozers and shovels, which will be approved of by most of the white folk in the vicinity. (The pattern is must usually seen with white people, although there's nothing to prevent blacks and people of other races from developing sacred land.) Standing Rock is a good example: while lots of people stood with the natives, the ones who didn't give a crap about the "prairie n?gg?rs" won. (Question marks substituted for vowels to get around lameness filter, which is unfortunate since it hinders talking about people's attitudes.)
So, I don't understand what you're talking about. Unfortunately, what you've got is a widely shared delusion.
All traditional religions involving the supernatural lead to contradictions.
I'll grant you that the empirical evidence against an all-knowing, all-powerful, completely benevolent God is very strong, and the Problem of Pain has caused an immense amount of twisted thinking over the centuries.
I don't see the contradictions. Miracles don't contradict science, and if they were scientifically explainable they wouldn't be miracles. Saying that God overrides science in some places at some times isn't a contradiction.
It's possible that your claim is true, but I don't know all the religions that involve the supernatural, so I can't verify it on a case-by-case basis. If you're saying that believing in the supernatural is self-contradictory, I just don't see it.
We can't prove there is nothing supernatural in the sense of thoroughly violating science as we know it. There's actually mountains of evidence for the supernatural in this sense, although it tends to be fairly weak evidence.
First, there's still a lot we don't understand and can't explain. We can't say everything can be explained by science until we have explained everything scientifically. It's certainly a reasonable world-view, with a lot of evidence behind it, but it can't be proven, and therefore can't be used as the basis of a proof.
Second, there's all sorts of details that we will never know. We can trace evolution pretty well, but we can't determine why each little thing happened. I know a scientist who believes that God guided evolution to produce us, which is not possible to disprove. Again, it's a reasonable world view with lots of support to think it happened randomly, and it certainly could have, but it's not proof.
Third, science can't say there isn't a God, because science can work only on things that are independently and objectively observable. It can use subjective experiences, but only if those are fixed in an objective form. Many symptoms, particularly of mental illnesses, are based on subjective reports, but there's enough of them and they agree well enough so we can say that this is depression and that is schizophrenia, and suggest appropriate treatments.
We can identify religious people based on self-reporting. We can examine correlations with all sorts of things. We can learn a lot about what religion as a human phenomenon is like. What we can't do is determine whether there's anything to it. I have a priest friend who talked about the sense of God, and from what I've been able to figure out it's not a rare thing. This is a subjective account. You can't point a finger and say "Look! God!". (You can cause at least something similar with electrical stimulation in the brain, which may or may not be the same thing. Either this sense is an accident of the evolution of the brain, or it's the real deal. It's not possible to determine which with science, since it's a question of, although I'd be interested in religion as practiced or not practiced by extraterrestrial intelligent beings.
There's a movie out there. I can pirate it, or I can not watch it. Tell me what difference it makes to the copyright holder if I do one rather than the other.
Make sure that this difference is something the copyright holder can notice. If I hit the copyright holder over the head from behind, that makes a noticeable difference. If I take something the copyright holder physically has, that makes a noticeable difference. If I change the copyright holder's bank balance, that's a noticeable difference. Tell me the difference I make in his or her life if I quietly pirate a movie at home instead of not watching it.
In the US, I need sufficient funds to cover last month's expenses, and by doing that I pay precisely nothing for my credit. How much of this discussion is being wasted by having people from two different situations talking past each other?
You don't pay much attention, do you? Past Presidents have avoided taunting North Korea in general. If a war starts, Seoul will be destroyed, and everybody else seems to realize that.
Trump was promising quick solutions. So far, we've got the ACA and ISIS still functioning. The Republicans have been attempting to repeal the ACA, but have not come up with anything remotely acceptable, and as far as I can tell won't be. Trump's promises are mostly still vaporware.
Trump has said there are "very fine people" among Nazis and white supremacists. As I said, he can't stick to a "Nazis are bad" message for more than a day. He can, of course, show more stamina when condemning peaceful protesters and (probably illegally) demanding they be fired, as long as they contain a lot of blacks.
Trump did indeed suspend that stupid law, while making fun of Puerto Rico's inability to deal with devastation all by themselves, but he sure took his time over it. That wasted time will result in more people killed because Trump doesn't appear to care about Puerto Rico.
I didn't claim that Trump was bad because he trashed the economy. You claimed that Trump was good because he didn't trash the results of the Obama years.
Democrats are not superhuman bogeymen. They're in the minority. Look that word up sometime.
Do you honestly think executives promising to support candidates as much as they can is new in any way? Diebold promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to bush, for example, and that's a much more dangerous position, since he was selling unauditable voting machines.
Clinton won a large majority of superdelegates, and a slight majority of regular delegates. The DNC is a private organization that tries to get the best candidate. Having no brakes on the process gets candidates like George McGovern and Donald Trump.
The polls didn't reflect chances of winning. Clinton has been the target of a right-wing smear campaign for decades, and they left Sanders alone pretty much. In the general election, his self-description as a socialist would have been a big hindrance.
I'm saying this as one who supported Sanders in the nominating process, by the way.
Trump's been setting new disapproval rating records, so Trump disapprovers, at least, are in a large majority.
The US people definitely preferred Clinton in the election, and by a pretty large margin. We all know who won, but only Trumpistas claim it was the will of the people.
To pick on only one point, border security is anathema to both sides. Leftists like people coming to share in the country, and Rightists like sources of cheap easy-to-abuse labor.
He's also in a pissing match with North Korea, which as the potential to kill a lot of innocent people.
Health care reform is not being tried. The proposed ACA replacements have been so bad that there's a lot of pressure on Republicans not to vote for them. The last attempt to deprive tens of millions of decent health care failed, even when they bribed a Senator by proposing to leave the ACA intact in her state.
He can't take and stick to a position that Nazis are bad. Instead, he states that there are very fine white supremacists.
As far as handling natural disasters, he's not waiving the law that says shipping between the US mainland and Puerto Rico have to be in US-registered ships, which is slowing what aid can get there.
Since we're still operating on the last Obama fiscal year, and Trump hasn't managed to get his own policies in effect, the economy now is basically due to Obama, not Trump.
I haven't even gotten into Trump's record on appointments, which is dismal.
And everything you said is completely irrelevant, because Trump couldn't stick to a statement about Nazis being bad, which you'd think any politician would be happy to make.. He said there were very fine people on both sides.
You could read the declarations of secession and CSA constitution to get a sounder basis for knowing that the CSA was founded on slavery, and secession was about slavery. The Civil War wasn't actually fought about slavery directly, but it was a big factor behind the scenes. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to make it about slavery, at least for PR, and made it politically impossible for European governments to intervene on the side of the CSA.
He could be in financial and legal trouble when he steps down. I'd like to see a lawsuit clawing back money he received from US governments in defiance of the Constitution.
Somebody's got to buy new cars and sell them later for a used car market to exist. I wanted the latest safety features, which were available only on new cars. You go buy what you want, and I'm not going to criticize your choices.
Having bought a new car, I've got a 4-year zero interest loan. I normally make a lot more than zero interest on my investments, so paying it off cash would lose me money.
Can't see the forest for the trees, can you? The entire CC system raises prices unnecessarily, in direct proportion to how much credits cards are actually used.
That has no impact on my personal finances. If I stop using my card everywhere, prices aren't coming down. You could consider it a prisoner's dilemma with a very large number of players, and we're not going to get large numbers of people to forego the personal benefits without assurance that they'll pay lower prices.
You're on the dopamine-driven consumption treadmill
Do you always make unfavorable assumptions about people who have different viewpoints than you?
In the US, it's very rare to have fees. I don't think the merchant agreements allow them. Some places do offer small cash discounts, but they never advertise them.
I'm an American who uses credit cards for most purchases. The price isn't any higher, I get some protection against fraud, I get an average of a month and a half float, and I get points which I can use to buy things on Amazon. The trick is to pay them off each month, or the late fees and interest will kill you.
Thing is, it's fairly easy for a police officer to tell if I'm speeding and issue a ticket. It's a lot harder in general to see if I'm violating copyright.
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The US government violated lots of treaties with the natives the moment it became profitable to do so. Under US law, it was apparently acceptable. That doesn't make it right.
Why do people keep saying "the narrative" like there was only one? Why does it seem like people who talk about "the narrative" select one that makes their opponents look bad?
So far, I've gotten the most flak from my attitude that Islam isn't an inherently bad religion (although the worst flak came from my belief that people can change and deserve second chances). I'm aware that this is anecdotal evidence, but it's the best evidence anyone has brought up in this thread about who you can badmouth. There is this mysterious belief among people that they're being especially picked on.
I haven't seen much in the way of leftists hating whites, although there are some cases. Leftists tend to dislike the current social structure that favors white men, and often talk up things people who are not white men have accomplished, to try to balance out white culture and history.
The leftist attitude towards Christianity is largely about how Christianity presents itself. The loudest Christians in the US tend to be the intolerant irrational fundamentalist types, and if you look in the right places you will find other Christians blasting them. Many leftists don't notice the other side of Christianity, which is why I wind up defending Christianity in various places, and I'm not Christian.
In what sense is it open season on Christianity in the US? I hear complaints about how Christians are persecuted, and they usually wind up being cases where Christianity, or at least the complainer's idea of Christianity, isn't the preferred religion, or cases where the so-called Christians are using their religion as an excuse to be assholes. Other complaints amount to "they're saying mean things about us", and I'm not impressed.
Obviously, this doesn't apply everywhere in the world, but it appears to be true in the US.
Christianity covers a large number of very different people, and Christians say unpleasant things about each other.
In the meantime, I see lots and lots of vituperation directed as Islam and Muslims, so whoever "they" are, "they" aren't stopping criticism of other religions.
Historically, in the US, the usual result of some white guy finding a commercial use for ground the natives consider sacred is bulldozers and shovels, which will be approved of by most of the white folk in the vicinity. (The pattern is must usually seen with white people, although there's nothing to prevent blacks and people of other races from developing sacred land.) Standing Rock is a good example: while lots of people stood with the natives, the ones who didn't give a crap about the "prairie n?gg?rs" won. (Question marks substituted for vowels to get around lameness filter, which is unfortunate since it hinders talking about people's attitudes.)
So, I don't understand what you're talking about. Unfortunately, what you've got is a widely shared delusion.
I'll grant you that the empirical evidence against an all-knowing, all-powerful, completely benevolent God is very strong, and the Problem of Pain has caused an immense amount of twisted thinking over the centuries.
I don't see the contradictions. Miracles don't contradict science, and if they were scientifically explainable they wouldn't be miracles. Saying that God overrides science in some places at some times isn't a contradiction.
It's possible that your claim is true, but I don't know all the religions that involve the supernatural, so I can't verify it on a case-by-case basis. If you're saying that believing in the supernatural is self-contradictory, I just don't see it.
We can't prove there is nothing supernatural in the sense of thoroughly violating science as we know it. There's actually mountains of evidence for the supernatural in this sense, although it tends to be fairly weak evidence.
Nope.
First, there's still a lot we don't understand and can't explain. We can't say everything can be explained by science until we have explained everything scientifically. It's certainly a reasonable world-view, with a lot of evidence behind it, but it can't be proven, and therefore can't be used as the basis of a proof.
Second, there's all sorts of details that we will never know. We can trace evolution pretty well, but we can't determine why each little thing happened. I know a scientist who believes that God guided evolution to produce us, which is not possible to disprove. Again, it's a reasonable world view with lots of support to think it happened randomly, and it certainly could have, but it's not proof.
Third, science can't say there isn't a God, because science can work only on things that are independently and objectively observable. It can use subjective experiences, but only if those are fixed in an objective form. Many symptoms, particularly of mental illnesses, are based on subjective reports, but there's enough of them and they agree well enough so we can say that this is depression and that is schizophrenia, and suggest appropriate treatments.
We can identify religious people based on self-reporting. We can examine correlations with all sorts of things. We can learn a lot about what religion as a human phenomenon is like. What we can't do is determine whether there's anything to it. I have a priest friend who talked about the sense of God, and from what I've been able to figure out it's not a rare thing. This is a subjective account. You can't point a finger and say "Look! God!". (You can cause at least something similar with electrical stimulation in the brain, which may or may not be the same thing. Either this sense is an accident of the evolution of the brain, or it's the real deal. It's not possible to determine which with science, since it's a question of, although I'd be interested in religion as practiced or not practiced by extraterrestrial intelligent beings.
Okay, let me put this in very simple terms.
There's a movie out there. I can pirate it, or I can not watch it. Tell me what difference it makes to the copyright holder if I do one rather than the other. Make sure that this difference is something the copyright holder can notice. If I hit the copyright holder over the head from behind, that makes a noticeable difference. If I take something the copyright holder physically has, that makes a noticeable difference. If I change the copyright holder's bank balance, that's a noticeable difference. Tell me the difference I make in his or her life if I quietly pirate a movie at home instead of not watching it.
In the US, I need sufficient funds to cover last month's expenses, and by doing that I pay precisely nothing for my credit. How much of this discussion is being wasted by having people from two different situations talking past each other?
You don't pay much attention, do you? Past Presidents have avoided taunting North Korea in general. If a war starts, Seoul will be destroyed, and everybody else seems to realize that.
Trump was promising quick solutions. So far, we've got the ACA and ISIS still functioning. The Republicans have been attempting to repeal the ACA, but have not come up with anything remotely acceptable, and as far as I can tell won't be. Trump's promises are mostly still vaporware.
Trump has said there are "very fine people" among Nazis and white supremacists. As I said, he can't stick to a "Nazis are bad" message for more than a day. He can, of course, show more stamina when condemning peaceful protesters and (probably illegally) demanding they be fired, as long as they contain a lot of blacks.
Trump did indeed suspend that stupid law, while making fun of Puerto Rico's inability to deal with devastation all by themselves, but he sure took his time over it. That wasted time will result in more people killed because Trump doesn't appear to care about Puerto Rico.
I didn't claim that Trump was bad because he trashed the economy. You claimed that Trump was good because he didn't trash the results of the Obama years.
Democrats are not superhuman bogeymen. They're in the minority. Look that word up sometime.
Do you honestly think executives promising to support candidates as much as they can is new in any way? Diebold promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to bush, for example, and that's a much more dangerous position, since he was selling unauditable voting machines.
He's clearly ineffective at governing, no further words needed. What initiatives has he gotten through a friendly Congress?
Clinton won a large majority of superdelegates, and a slight majority of regular delegates. The DNC is a private organization that tries to get the best candidate. Having no brakes on the process gets candidates like George McGovern and Donald Trump.
The polls didn't reflect chances of winning. Clinton has been the target of a right-wing smear campaign for decades, and they left Sanders alone pretty much. In the general election, his self-description as a socialist would have been a big hindrance.
I'm saying this as one who supported Sanders in the nominating process, by the way.
Trump's been setting new disapproval rating records, so Trump disapprovers, at least, are in a large majority.
The US people definitely preferred Clinton in the election, and by a pretty large margin. We all know who won, but only Trumpistas claim it was the will of the people.
To pick on only one point, border security is anathema to both sides. Leftists like people coming to share in the country, and Rightists like sources of cheap easy-to-abuse labor.
He's also in a pissing match with North Korea, which as the potential to kill a lot of innocent people.
Health care reform is not being tried. The proposed ACA replacements have been so bad that there's a lot of pressure on Republicans not to vote for them. The last attempt to deprive tens of millions of decent health care failed, even when they bribed a Senator by proposing to leave the ACA intact in her state.
He can't take and stick to a position that Nazis are bad. Instead, he states that there are very fine white supremacists.
As far as handling natural disasters, he's not waiving the law that says shipping between the US mainland and Puerto Rico have to be in US-registered ships, which is slowing what aid can get there.
Since we're still operating on the last Obama fiscal year, and Trump hasn't managed to get his own policies in effect, the economy now is basically due to Obama, not Trump.
I haven't even gotten into Trump's record on appointments, which is dismal.
And everything you said is completely irrelevant, because Trump couldn't stick to a statement about Nazis being bad, which you'd think any politician would be happy to make.. He said there were very fine people on both sides.
You could read the declarations of secession and CSA constitution to get a sounder basis for knowing that the CSA was founded on slavery, and secession was about slavery. The Civil War wasn't actually fought about slavery directly, but it was a big factor behind the scenes. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to make it about slavery, at least for PR, and made it politically impossible for European governments to intervene on the side of the CSA.
He could be in financial and legal trouble when he steps down. I'd like to see a lawsuit clawing back money he received from US governments in defiance of the Constitution.
Somebody's got to buy new cars and sell them later for a used car market to exist. I wanted the latest safety features, which were available only on new cars. You go buy what you want, and I'm not going to criticize your choices.
Having bought a new car, I've got a 4-year zero interest loan. I normally make a lot more than zero interest on my investments, so paying it off cash would lose me money.
That has no impact on my personal finances. If I stop using my card everywhere, prices aren't coming down. You could consider it a prisoner's dilemma with a very large number of players, and we're not going to get large numbers of people to forego the personal benefits without assurance that they'll pay lower prices.
Do you always make unfavorable assumptions about people who have different viewpoints than you?
In the US, it's very rare to have fees. I don't think the merchant agreements allow them. Some places do offer small cash discounts, but they never advertise them.
I'm an American who uses credit cards for most purchases. The price isn't any higher, I get some protection against fraud, I get an average of a month and a half float, and I get points which I can use to buy things on Amazon. The trick is to pay them off each month, or the late fees and interest will kill you.
Don't worry. With the Equifax information, the bad guys will open credit lines for you.
Thing is, it's fairly easy for a police officer to tell if I'm speeding and issue a ticket. It's a lot harder in general to see if I'm violating copyright.
Ah, the worst features of public and private censorship combined! No accountability and sweeping coverage. How efficient of you.