It's a sad thing to say, but indeed we do need to reign in an out of control media. Frankly there was a time when journalist would rightly be outraged by such a statement. Frequently they were the ones trying to reign in abusive government. But nowadays, I think most of them would just be outraged, outraged that someone was trying to reduce their power and influence.
The modern media is not your grandfather's fourth estate, independent of state and clergy. In the past, this has a ring of truth to it, but not anymore. Basically, the modern media has morphed into our second estate, our new clergy, to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the old clergy.
Like the old clergy, the roll of the modern media is to tell us what to think. To dictate our morals, habits and leanings. They spread the gospel of the ruling classes, but like the clergy, also vie with the ruling classes for supremacy. They abuse their power and influence for their own gain, not ours.
The anchor has replaced the priest. The bulletin the mass. The opinion column the sermon. I do not miss the old religious orders in the slightest, but I equally mislike the new media that has taken its place. It's not a fourth estate to me, so I see little point in granting it so much privilege and status.
I know that by saying this, I'm playing into the hands of those who would see freedom of speech curtailed. But I feel that the modern media really is a "feral beast", whos cons are now beginning to outweigh its pros, and which is becoming more of an enemy than an ally to democracy. I'd like the media to be something better than it is, I really would. But it isn't and sooner or later we are going to have to face up to that fact. Truth be told, I'm more afraid of the media than confident in it.
Since preciously few business transactions are conducted within the person of citizens of Australia, I'd say this matter is one of only fairly esoteric academic interest.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
Ask him the procedure for getting yourself off the no-fly list.
1. Become a card carrying Republican. 2. Attend Church every Sunday. 3. Report UnAmericanism in friends and neighbors. 4. Watch FOX NEWS exclusively and echo its opinions. 5. Most Importantly of all.... Donate bucketloads of cash to the GOP!!
Anything less and you're siding with the terrorists.
/b/ is a cesspit. A conglomeration of all that is disturbing, perverted, juvenile, inane, humorous, annoying, offensive, shocking and vile. The site is much worse than the sum of its parts.
And yet..... I'm glad it's there. I'm glad that there still exists a place where people can be offensive, racist and rude in all manner of ways. Frankly, the place warms my heart because of its simple honesty. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than the asshole of the internet. It even revels in it. I can respect that kind of honesty.
Ultimately, the/b/tards are more human than the legions of Politically Correct hypocrites that plague our modern society. Humanity isn't always in the images of angels or gods. Sometimes we're altogether more earthly beings, and places like/b/ should serve to remind us of that. If/b/ did not exist, it would be necessary for someone to create it, because/b/ is a part of what humanity is.
To finish off, anytime I have browsed/b/, despite the form of the post and their extreme vulgarity, I never get the vibe that the place is filled with genuinely evil individuals spewing hate and bile. It seems to me that the/b/tards are rather more akin to jesters, or cynics than to Nazi's or the KKK./b/tards are more likely to laugh and deride such people than side with them. The site seems to be more playful than malicious.
I can see the hypocritical legions of politicians, reporters and busybodies rallying to condemn/b/ as hell on earth, and I can see the/b/tards laughing and mocking them as they do so. But the possibility of the/b/tards being cowed and broken by such a crusade frightens me, because I think it's entirely possible that they will be sought out and persecuted by our modern witch hunters. To me,/b/, ugly as it is, represents our freedoms, and if it falls, I can't see how anything else truly worthwhile in our society can resist being torn down as well.
Sites like/b/ are proof that our society still free. Perversely, its continuing existence akin to an eternal flame of liberty (A flame which no doubt/b/ would collectively attempt to fart on). If it gets snuffed out, I for one won't sleep soundly at night.
60's music plays as Linus Torvalds and a swinging LUG group can be seen dancing in various shots to a backdrop of psychedelic screensavers. Hensonesque penguin puppets skitter humorously in the foreground throughout, whilst in the background, Richard Stallman floats in a zen like mediation stance.
The sequence ends with whirling $ logo cutting into the next scene.
Capitalism is a force. Used wisely, it can be of great benefit. Left to its own devices, capitalism can trample the very society that supports it. It needs to have limits.
Left alone, agreements like this can erode the supposed free market in which they exists, leading to monopoly, reduced quality and higher prices. We have anti-trust agreements to protect consumers and producers. You may believe in some pure and unadulterated laissez faire market system, but the fact is that has been proven to be unworkable, no matter how many poor excuses are thrown up.
There is nothing racist or prejudiced in what I wrote, as anyone can read. I wrote about police reactions. I am happy to provide sources. I am happy to provide links to YouTube videos of the barriers, burning police station and rioters (in 4-5 hours, YouTube is blocked from work).
You played up the race relations aspect of the story, despite the fact that the true thrust of it should have been the alleged police and state confinement and eviction of the residents. Your poor excuse that "Youtube is blocked form work" is hardly sufficient to prevent you from at least naming the incident. I've spent quite a bit of time Googling for this alleged incident, also adding a "France" keyword as this seems the most likely location. However, nothing has come up.
This does not change that it was a real incident.
You have not even established that the incident in question ever took place. Plus, the story is only remotely related to the submission, and your are posting as an AC. In all likelihood, you fabricated the entire incident, and are trolling the board. In short, Cite, or be modded down.
Deep packet inspection technology was developed by the likes of Cisco for the sole purpose of obtaining access to the Chinese market. The Communist Party wanted the power of the internet, but they also wanted the power to control it. With deep packet inspection and a suite of other related solutions, I think it's reasonable to say they got their wish. There are millions of Chinese internet users and the country is father from a revolution now that it was in 1989.
It's not just China. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran are also taking advantage of this new technology, every byte of it developed by corporations right here in the "free" west.
And now? The technology is simply being marketed here to. Exported back into the west if you will. ISP, companies, governments are all being given the power to put the internet genie back in the bottle. Time was that corporations were developing technology to help make democracy stronger. Now they're simply giving democracy the rope it needs to throughly hang itself.
I'd like to be optimistic about our society, but frankly it's too tiring in this day and age of fear and surveillance. The worst part is the overwhelming acceptance, nay approval, of our loss of freedoms. The Net Neutrality debate is not an isolated argument. It's a symptom of the underlying shift in Western society, back into a dark age.
I flew once shortly after I had had a sinus congestion of some sort.
Do not do this.
The initial flight was unpleasant, with not only my ears, but even my sinuses popping. I'm talking about the ones near your nose. Fleeing those pop at 36000 is at once relieving and incredibly disturbing. Anyway, something must have gotten in on that flight, I suspect from one of the many other passengers who spent the flight snorting, snuffling and blowing their noses.
By the time of the return flight a week later I had spent seven days breathing almost completely through my mouth, almost suffocating at night. The mucus was bad. It had gone from the copious runny clear kind, to a much more viscous and putrid green and yellow gunk with the consistency of caramel. I couldn't smell anything, except for the slightly puss-like odor emanating from the center of my head.
This time, only one of the nose sinuses popped. The other one just kept discharging, which was a pity as I had half hoped the inside of my face would explode from the pressure differential, allowing me the blessed relief of death. Surrounded by another entourage of acute sinus outbreaks, I expected the worst. When I arrived, it was raining at the airport.
It took me about six months to fully recover. I finally became able to breath through my nose after about a month. My lungs stopped feeling weak after about three months. Two or three months after that, I was able to smell things again. It occurs to me now that I really should have seen a doctor about all that.
In conclusion, I'd wear a mask when flying, except it would set off all kinds of alarms. On the bright side, I know more about the human repository system than I ever expected to.
The modern Republican party is the result of Richard Nixon's conversion of old Southern Confederates from the Democratic party. This conversion was so successful that these Confederates now in fact form the Republican party base, and the party in turn has become a Confederate body.
The idea of the Republicans as the party of corporatism and big business is true to a degree, but only by degree in comparison to the Democrats or any other modern political party. Corporate influence permeates our political landscape too completely to distinguish party boundaries. Instead the true distinction between the Republicans and the Democrats is that old Confederate streak in the former, by now faded and disintegrating in the latter.
But in the GOP the stainless banner shines unsullied, albeit not in a public fashion. But it's a safe bet to assume that a great many in the Republican party hold the Confederate flag in no less reverence than they do the Stars and Stripes. Many have said that the Republicans are verging on, or have already committed, treason against their country. This may indeed be true, but only if that country was the old union. To a Confederate mind, their loyalty to the "true" United States is beyond question.
The effect of all this has been the general regression of American society. Essentially your entire country is reverting back to the southern mindset, but one for the modern world of course. Slavery might not be on the cards, but racism, xenophobia, jingoism, militarism and of course social conservatism all are.
The sad truth is there is little to nothing you can do to stop any of this. The American people have chosen this path. They vote for it, with ballots, feet and wallets. This isn't the result of some grand plan of Richard Nixon. He did not set any of this in motion. Rather he simply foresaw it, forty years ago, as he foresaw the rise of China and the end of the Gold Standard, and moved his party to a favorable position to take advantage of the inevitable flow of history.
I guess I just care a lot more about truth than about process.
Dude, seriously, You can't handle the truth.
The truth is that process is there to stop people like you from trampling over the rest of us. The truth is that you are more dangerous to your neighbors than a whole gang of murderers. The truth is your children have more to fear from you than from any pedophile boegyman.
I don't think much of the 5th Ammendment, for example. Why should you be able to ask someone under oath, "did you kill him?" at a murder trial? I don't want to hear that the slam-dunk evidence against the pedophile is 'inadmissible' because cops didn't follow procedure. But I guess that's just me.
No it's not just you unfortunately. You have friends. Many and powerful friends who share your insidious opinions. I'm sure you'll do a great job kissing their feet to get what you feel is your rightful place in the new order. Word to the wise; no matter the stratum, you'll still be beneath someone else's boot.
Well, it's more than a bad idea. E-Voting is probably the biggest threat to democracy since the second world war. I'm not exaggerating here. It's the apathy within we should be afraid of.
But I digress. Let's roll out an analogy here.
Let's say the government contracted out the counting out of paper ballots to private companies. Let's say again that these companies took your paper ballots into a huge warehouse with blacked out windows and wouldn't tell or show anyone how they were counting the ballots. They simply emerged hours or days later and announced the result. Would you be satisfied with this? Would you accept the result?
Let's soften the blow. Supposed the company allowed government inspector into the warehouse to supervise the counting. Would that make you feel more confident in the result?
Now, what is the difference between the warehouse, and the current systems of E-Voting. What is the difference between the warehouse and [b]any[/b] system of E-Voting, present or future? Why accept a computerized count if you wouldn't accept the warehouse. (Of course many people would accept the warehouse, but I digress...)
You know what the depressing thing is. Most people want E-Voting. Not because they think it's cheaper. Not because they think it's more reliable. It's because they think it's cool.
Eventually, the power of the party to control communications will be overwhelmed, and they'll be made accountable for their crimes against China.
The Party's control over China, and arguably itself, is more tenuous than one would imagine. Essentially, by restricting freedom of the press, and freedom of movement, the Party has placed very real limits on its own in-country intelligence. Simply put, very often, Beijing just does not know what is going on in its far flung provinces. Their power rests in passing decrees and hoping that the orders will not become diluted as they pass down the chain of command.
The upside of this is that if the government itself has only a dim picture, then the common man is completely in the dark. Revolution is nigh impossible in this climate as even a mass popular uprising in a major city may never be heard in time for other cities to take advantage of it, but quickly enough for the government to begin shuffling troops about and round up dissidents.
The header seems to suggest that this is all users, or the majority, which of course isn't the case. Most Chinese are not all that interested in the many websites that are mostly in foreign languages they don't understand.
So? The difference between a riot and a revolution is ticked off professionals, intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. As the hungry mob is the body, so are such people the brain, giving purpose to an otherwise fairly random act of mass violence.
Do you think riots had never happened in Paris before 1789? That people had never faced hard winter's before? Do you think that the Bolsheviks had the overwhelming popular support they really claimed to have in 1917? Do you think that most people in China even knew what Mao's brand of communism was all about?
People with an education and enough guile turn situations to their own advantage. Give them real grievances and a disgruntled populace and they can swing the masses in just about any way they please. The Chinese government knows this, and they are likely terrified of this rising middle class disgruntlement.
So, are we supposed to all fall prostrate before the spectacle of the Viginia Tech shooting? Should we abandon our principles in the face of the masses of innocent college students who would get gunned down because we wanted unconscionable things like human rights and basic liberties? How long are people going to wave the students bodies around on their own personal flagpole?
You may as well argue about terrorism and child porn. Personally, I'm tired of emotive arguments. Hearing one is a pretty sure fire acid test of whether the speaker cares about free society at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a sad thing to say, but indeed we do need to reign in an out of control media. Frankly there was a time when journalist would rightly be outraged by such a statement. Frequently they were the ones trying to reign in abusive government. But nowadays, I think most of them would just be outraged, outraged that someone was trying to reduce their power and influence.
The modern media is not your grandfather's fourth estate, independent of state and clergy. In the past, this has a ring of truth to it, but not anymore. Basically, the modern media has morphed into our second estate, our new clergy, to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the old clergy.
Like the old clergy, the roll of the modern media is to tell us what to think. To dictate our morals, habits and leanings. They spread the gospel of the ruling classes, but like the clergy, also vie with the ruling classes for supremacy. They abuse their power and influence for their own gain, not ours.
The anchor has replaced the priest. The bulletin the mass. The opinion column the sermon. I do not miss the old religious orders in the slightest, but I equally mislike the new media that has taken its place. It's not a fourth estate to me, so I see little point in granting it so much privilege and status.
I know that by saying this, I'm playing into the hands of those who would see freedom of speech curtailed. But I feel that the modern media really is a "feral beast", whos cons are now beginning to outweigh its pros, and which is becoming more of an enemy than an ally to democracy. I'd like the media to be something better than it is, I really would. But it isn't and sooner or later we are going to have to face up to that fact. Truth be told, I'm more afraid of the media than confident in it.
Ethical? Journalist? I'm not sure I follow.
Since preciously few business transactions are conducted within the person of citizens of Australia, I'd say this matter is one of only fairly esoteric academic interest.
Neither but they sell items to both sides.
1. Become a card carrying Republican.
2. Attend Church every Sunday.
3. Report UnAmericanism in friends and neighbors.
4. Watch FOX NEWS exclusively and echo its opinions.
5. Most Importantly of all.... Donate bucketloads of cash to the GOP!!
Anything less and you're siding with the terrorists.
/b/ is a cesspit. A conglomeration of all that is disturbing, perverted, juvenile, inane, humorous, annoying, offensive, shocking and vile. The site is much worse than the sum of its parts.
/b/tards are more human than the legions of Politically Correct hypocrites that plague our modern society. Humanity isn't always in the images of angels or gods. Sometimes we're altogether more earthly beings, and places like /b/ should serve to remind us of that. If /b/ did not exist, it would be necessary for someone to create it, because /b/ is a part of what humanity is.
/b/, despite the form of the post and their extreme vulgarity, I never get the vibe that the place is filled with genuinely evil individuals spewing hate and bile. It seems to me that the /b/tards are rather more akin to jesters, or cynics than to Nazi's or the KKK. /b/tards are more likely to laugh and deride such people than side with them. The site seems to be more playful than malicious.
/b/ as hell on earth, and I can see the /b/tards laughing and mocking them as they do so. But the possibility of the /b/tards being cowed and broken by such a crusade frightens me, because I think it's entirely possible that they will be sought out and persecuted by our modern witch hunters. To me, /b/, ugly as it is, represents our freedoms, and if it falls, I can't see how anything else truly worthwhile in our society can resist being torn down as well.
/b/ are proof that our society still free. Perversely, its continuing existence akin to an eternal flame of liberty (A flame which no doubt /b/ would collectively attempt to fart on). If it gets snuffed out, I for one won't sleep soundly at night.
And yet..... I'm glad it's there. I'm glad that there still exists a place where people can be offensive, racist and rude in all manner of ways. Frankly, the place warms my heart because of its simple honesty. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than the asshole of the internet. It even revels in it. I can respect that kind of honesty.
Ultimately, the
To finish off, anytime I have browsed
I can see the hypocritical legions of politicians, reporters and busybodies rallying to condemn
Sites like
If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear!
In that case, I guess Blogger must be responsible for every last syllable posted on their site.
Musical Interlude begins
60's music plays as Linus Torvalds and a swinging LUG group can be seen dancing in various shots to a backdrop of psychedelic screensavers. Hensonesque penguin puppets skitter humorously in the foreground throughout, whilst in the background, Richard Stallman floats in a zen like mediation stance.
The sequence ends with whirling $ logo cutting into the next scene.
Capitalism is a force. Used wisely, it can be of great benefit. Left to its own devices, capitalism can trample the very society that supports it. It needs to have limits.
Left alone, agreements like this can erode the supposed free market in which they exists, leading to monopoly, reduced quality and higher prices. We have anti-trust agreements to protect consumers and producers. You may believe in some pure and unadulterated laissez faire market system, but the fact is that has been proven to be unworkable, no matter how many poor excuses are thrown up.
You played up the race relations aspect of the story, despite the fact that the true thrust of it should have been the alleged police and state confinement and eviction of the residents. Your poor excuse that "Youtube is blocked form work" is hardly sufficient to prevent you from at least naming the incident. I've spent quite a bit of time Googling for this alleged incident, also adding a "France" keyword as this seems the most likely location. However, nothing has come up.
You have not even established that the incident in question ever took place. Plus, the story is only remotely related to the submission, and your are posting as an AC. In all likelihood, you fabricated the entire incident, and are trolling the board. In short, Cite, or be modded down.
Deep packet inspection technology was developed by the likes of Cisco for the sole purpose of obtaining access to the Chinese market. The Communist Party wanted the power of the internet, but they also wanted the power to control it. With deep packet inspection and a suite of other related solutions, I think it's reasonable to say they got their wish. There are millions of Chinese internet users and the country is father from a revolution now that it was in 1989.
It's not just China. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran are also taking advantage of this new technology, every byte of it developed by corporations right here in the "free" west.
And now? The technology is simply being marketed here to. Exported back into the west if you will. ISP, companies, governments are all being given the power to put the internet genie back in the bottle. Time was that corporations were developing technology to help make democracy stronger. Now they're simply giving democracy the rope it needs to throughly hang itself.
I'd like to be optimistic about our society, but frankly it's too tiring in this day and age of fear and surveillance. The worst part is the overwhelming acceptance, nay approval, of our loss of freedoms. The Net Neutrality debate is not an isolated argument. It's a symptom of the underlying shift in Western society, back into a dark age.
I flew once shortly after I had had a sinus congestion of some sort.
Do not do this.
The initial flight was unpleasant, with not only my ears, but even my sinuses popping. I'm talking about the ones near your nose. Fleeing those pop at 36000 is at once relieving and incredibly disturbing. Anyway, something must have gotten in on that flight, I suspect from one of the many other passengers who spent the flight snorting, snuffling and blowing their noses.
By the time of the return flight a week later I had spent seven days breathing almost completely through my mouth, almost suffocating at night. The mucus was bad. It had gone from the copious runny clear kind, to a much more viscous and putrid green and yellow gunk with the consistency of caramel. I couldn't smell anything, except for the slightly puss-like odor emanating from the center of my head.
This time, only one of the nose sinuses popped. The other one just kept discharging, which was a pity as I had half hoped the inside of my face would explode from the pressure differential, allowing me the blessed relief of death. Surrounded by another entourage of acute sinus outbreaks, I expected the worst. When I arrived, it was raining at the airport.
It took me about six months to fully recover. I finally became able to breath through my nose after about a month. My lungs stopped feeling weak after about three months. Two or three months after that, I was able to smell things again. It occurs to me now that I really should have seen a doctor about all that.
In conclusion, I'd wear a mask when flying, except it would set off all kinds of alarms. On the bright side, I know more about the human repository system than I ever expected to.
The modern Republican party is the result of Richard Nixon's conversion of old Southern Confederates from the Democratic party. This conversion was so successful that these Confederates now in fact form the Republican party base, and the party in turn has become a Confederate body.
The idea of the Republicans as the party of corporatism and big business is true to a degree, but only by degree in comparison to the Democrats or any other modern political party. Corporate influence permeates our political landscape too completely to distinguish party boundaries. Instead the true distinction between the Republicans and the Democrats is that old Confederate streak in the former, by now faded and disintegrating in the latter.
But in the GOP the stainless banner shines unsullied, albeit not in a public fashion. But it's a safe bet to assume that a great many in the Republican party hold the Confederate flag in no less reverence than they do the Stars and Stripes. Many have said that the Republicans are verging on, or have already committed, treason against their country. This may indeed be true, but only if that country was the old union. To a Confederate mind, their loyalty to the "true" United States is beyond question.
The effect of all this has been the general regression of American society. Essentially your entire country is reverting back to the southern mindset, but one for the modern world of course. Slavery might not be on the cards, but racism, xenophobia, jingoism, militarism and of course social conservatism all are.
The sad truth is there is little to nothing you can do to stop any of this. The American people have chosen this path. They vote for it, with ballots, feet and wallets. This isn't the result of some grand plan of Richard Nixon. He did not set any of this in motion. Rather he simply foresaw it, forty years ago, as he foresaw the rise of China and the end of the Gold Standard, and moved his party to a favorable position to take advantage of the inevitable flow of history.
Dude, seriously, You can't handle the truth.
The truth is that process is there to stop people like you from trampling over the rest of us. The truth is that you are more dangerous to your neighbors than a whole gang of murderers. The truth is your children have more to fear from you than from any pedophile boegyman.
No it's not just you unfortunately. You have friends. Many and powerful friends who share your insidious opinions. I'm sure you'll do a great job kissing their feet to get what you feel is your rightful place in the new order. Word to the wise; no matter the stratum, you'll still be beneath someone else's boot.
That's no core dump. That's the compressed data.
I don't get it. How can a "free" upgrade cost money? Is there some loophole in trade law that allows this?
The cat. What happened to the cat?!
Well, it's more than a bad idea. E-Voting is probably the biggest threat to democracy since the second world war. I'm not exaggerating here. It's the apathy within we should be afraid of.
But I digress. Let's roll out an analogy here.
Let's say the government contracted out the counting out of paper ballots to private companies. Let's say again that these companies took your paper ballots into a huge warehouse with blacked out windows and wouldn't tell or show anyone how they were counting the ballots. They simply emerged hours or days later and announced the result. Would you be satisfied with this? Would you accept the result?
Let's soften the blow. Supposed the company allowed government inspector into the warehouse to supervise the counting. Would that make you feel more confident in the result?
Now, what is the difference between the warehouse, and the current systems of E-Voting. What is the difference between the warehouse and [b]any[/b] system of E-Voting, present or future? Why accept a computerized count if you wouldn't accept the warehouse. (Of course many people would accept the warehouse, but I digress...)
You know what the depressing thing is. Most people want E-Voting. Not because they think it's cheaper. Not because they think it's more reliable. It's because they think it's cool.
The Party's control over China, and arguably itself, is more tenuous than one would imagine. Essentially, by restricting freedom of the press, and freedom of movement, the Party has placed very real limits on its own in-country intelligence. Simply put, very often, Beijing just does not know what is going on in its far flung provinces. Their power rests in passing decrees and hoping that the orders will not become diluted as they pass down the chain of command.
The upside of this is that if the government itself has only a dim picture, then the common man is completely in the dark. Revolution is nigh impossible in this climate as even a mass popular uprising in a major city may never be heard in time for other cities to take advantage of it, but quickly enough for the government to begin shuffling troops about and round up dissidents.
The Party is going nowhere fast.
So? The difference between a riot and a revolution is ticked off professionals, intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. As the hungry mob is the body, so are such people the brain, giving purpose to an otherwise fairly random act of mass violence.
Do you think riots had never happened in Paris before 1789? That people had never faced hard winter's before? Do you think that the Bolsheviks had the overwhelming popular support they really claimed to have in 1917? Do you think that most people in China even knew what Mao's brand of communism was all about?
People with an education and enough guile turn situations to their own advantage. Give them real grievances and a disgruntled populace and they can swing the masses in just about any way they please. The Chinese government knows this, and they are likely terrified of this rising middle class disgruntlement.
So, are we supposed to all fall prostrate before the spectacle of the Viginia Tech shooting? Should we abandon our principles in the face of the masses of innocent college students who would get gunned down because we wanted unconscionable things like human rights and basic liberties? How long are people going to wave the students bodies around on their own personal flagpole?
You may as well argue about terrorism and child porn. Personally, I'm tired of emotive arguments. Hearing one is a pretty sure fire acid test of whether the speaker cares about free society at all.