How about the part where organizations and individuals can contribute unlimited funds in "campaign contributions" to candidates
This is factually incorrect. But even ignoring that, why do you have it in quotes? Are you saying that candidates, whose personal and business financial records are highly scrutinized and completely available to auditors with local, state, and federal election officials and prosecutors (if need be) are taking money paid into campaign funds (which are completely open to inspection as public records) and personally running off with it? That's big news if you know of actual examples, since politicians who do that sort of thing are held criminally liable, and go to jail.
What should be illegal is politicians taking large sums of money from these "lobbyists"
So I'll ask you the same question as I did the GP. Do you have evidence of politicians taking large sums of money and not being prosecuted for that? As an example, the former governor of Virginia is about to go jail for doing that. Prosecutors are standing by to pursue other politicians who do the same. Which politicians do you know of who are taking large sums of money and not being prosecuted? Please list them.
Or are you referring to donations to campaigns, which have to be reported, publicly, down to the penny - as the money comes into the campaign fund, as as each penny is spent. Are you aware of politicians who are personally raiding those campaign funds and not being prosecuted? It does happen sometimes, that idiot politicians get greedy and hit those funds. And the audit trail makes that plainly obvious, and they are prosecuted. If you know of cases where they've taken such cash out of their campaign funds, but prosecutors are not aware, why aren't you saying something about it?
politicians are supposed to do whats best for the people they represent, not what's best for whoever can pay them the most money!
That sounds pretty serious! Which politicians are taking the money? If you have new information, it will be front page news tomorrow. Because that means that you've identified people who are someone handling money that career auditors with local, state, and federal election commissions are unable to see, even though they have complete access to the bank records, tax filings, and other information for every one of them. You must have some serious inside scoop! Please, share.
It's not checks and balances if the entire goal of the House is to make the President fail.
But it's OK with you if the entire purpose of the Senate is to make the House Of Representatives fail?
The entire purpose of our structure of government is to make it adversarial. That IS checks and balances. You conveniently forget things that actually do get passed and signed, and focus only on your frustration when the agenda of one person is disliked by a majority of the people in the country, and by congress. That's the whole point. If I were elected to an executive branch office, and said out loud that my entire agenda would be to do things you, personally, find deplorable, wouldn't you want to see that agenda fail? No? You'd like to see the agenda you dislike succeed? Why is that?
Just because the previous President fucked the goose doesn't mean that your party can't strive to learn the mistakes of the past and do better.
Again, that's the whole point. The current president is putting on a display of policy absurdity and stunning lack of competency - and so of course the legislative branch (including many in his own party) are pushing back against his positions. The majority of the country profoundly dislikes the health care finance law they rammed through on 100% partisan grounds. The majority of the country find his foreign policy positions to be complete feckless, and clumsily handled even if they approve of them. The point is that exactly such things were plainly going to happen given his ideology and stated positions on a wide spectrum of things. People saw that while he was first campaigning for office. You're suggesting that despite knowing he was going to be a disaster, and despite there being very good reasons to oppose most of his positions on everything within his constitutional purview (as well as the things he's doing that are well outside his role), that everyone should just go along for the ride? Gotta love that about the lefties: "We should all get along a work in the spirit of compromise, by doing what we say." No. Obama and his party have solidly earned the opposition they've cultivated, and the recent mid-term election demonstrates once again how tone deaf they've been. Opposition to them as they acted in that mode isn't a problem, it's a solution.
the House of Representatives has been under GOP control since 2010, which is the last time he could get bills through a friendly Congress.
Yeah, it's called "checks and balances."
He's had the Senate all that time, until he lost it. And he used THAT friendly house of congress to make sure that anything he didn't like, but didn't want to be seen vetoing, died on Harry Reid's desk. It goes both ways. The GOP had one house of congress, and Obama had the other house of congress and his own veto power to kill anything he didn't like that came out of that lower house. We don't elect a president to make laws, we elect him to EXECUTE the laws after the legislature has created them. That's why we have a legislative branch, and an executive branch. And a good thing, too.
Lobbying is just another word for bribery. This used to be illegal and I'm not sure how or why it became legal in the first place.
Your right to bring your concerns to your elected representatives and executives is preserved, very carefully and deliberately, in the constitution. Likewise is your right to assemble in a group to get things done.
So, you think that a visit to your congressional representative's office to explain your position on (pick a topic... net neutrality? gun control? immigration? whatever) should be illegal? Why do you think that? "Lobbying" is the act (historically) of waiting in the lobby of a building to for a moment to bend the ear of a passing legislator on his or her way between other engagements. Hence the term. You're thinking that should be illegal?
Or are you just not happy when you and ten of your friends who share a common interest designate one of you to make the trip to that same office to speak on behalf of the other nine of you, as a group? Is that the part you think should be illegal? How about when you and your ten friends realize that there's actually a million of you that have a common interest, and you decide to pool some resources and hire someone who lives and works in the state or federal capital, and who knows who and where everything is and how it all works, to explain your collective position and priorities to that same congressman? Is that the part that should be illegal? Why? Which part is the illegal part - where a million of you act in concert, or where you finally realize that having a professional pull your agenda together into a coherent, easily conveyed whole means that you hire someone for that role? Please be specific about which thing you'd make illegal:
1) Gathering in groups?
2) Pooling resources?
3) Hiring someone?
4) Talking to congressional representatives or regulators?
At which point is someone bribing somebody else? Do you mean that the congress person is actually taking cash under the table? Do you have evidence of that happening, and it not resulting in prosecution? If you do, why are you keeping it from the FEC and the other agencies that investigate such crimes?
Or is it that you just don't like the fact that people who run businesses decide to take some of their money and hire professionals to reduce the overall noise level and represent their interests in a more focused way? Do you not like that because you can't be bothered to identify a suitably large group of people who share your own interests, and who do exactly the same thing? Millions of other people do - do you think that the NAACP, or the AARP, or the Sierra Club, or the NRA, or labor unions or other groups should be barred from taking their concerns to their elected representatives in a unified way, instead of expecting all of their thousands or millions of members to descend on the same congressional office individually, all day every day, to say the same things?
This tends to drive language purists insane. They seem to endlessly complain when popular "made up" words get added to the dictionary, without really stopping to consider that every single word in the dictionary was "made up" at some point in history, as was every grammar rule in existence.
Most complaints about change in language aren't about the introduction of some new meme-ish neologism or term that's sprung into use. The real (and justified) complaints are about changes that reflect a reduction in clarity, or which make expression surrounding critical thinking or subtlety less fashionable or in real terms more difficult. Changes in language that dumb communication down should indeed be fought against, and loudly. Giving in to the habits of the incurious, the poor communicators, and the lazy is just a way to make more of them.
Voter suppression is asking you to give up two hours of work to go and get the ID then making you have to wait in line for 6 hours to actually vote because their is not enough people hired for the booth,
How have you been functioning in daily life without a form of ID? Do you never write a check, never receive any sort of government service, deposit no checks because you have no checking account, etc? Is getting a photo ID once really that much of a hardship? How much time are you REALLY wasting, every day, if you can't have been bothered anywhere along the line in your entire life to have arranged to get something like a debit card connected to the money you spend? Someone who doesn't participate in any way in the banking system is going to be going inefficiently through life at every turn, traveling everywhere to use cash and have cashier's checks made for every bill paid through the mail... and you're considering it "voter suppression" for them to take the time involved once to get a photo ID?
And if your local municipality is such a hotbed of active voting but can't raise enough taxes to have more than one voting machine or more than a couple of poll workers on election day (to make the process more efficient), and all of those anxious, busy voters are much too busy for any of them to actually volunteer to help at the polling place, who exactly are you blaming? Is everything about every aspect of the costs and effort involved in running local election logistics always someone else's problem? People who bitch about that and yet do nothing to (with years of opportunity in advance) to actually make their local system work better are the ones making their own lives inconvenient - because they'd rather whine about it than step up, in the absence of paying more taxes (like everyone else) to fund more equipment and staff. You vote for a president once ever four years. A senator once every six. Is turnout for the generally sleepier local elections (school board, etc) really resulting in six hour waits, year in, year out, at your local library or school? I call BS. And if it happens once in several years, and that's just too much for you to stand, run for local office yourself, on the platform of spending more of your fellow local citizens' money on running more well-oiled local election machinery. Local election places are generally staffed by volunteers - and your complaint is there aren't enough people showing up to help. And you're calling that "voter suppression," presumably by some evil rich white guy somewhere else? What a joke.
That has the be the most un-American sentiment you could ever make. Voter suppression...
Stop it. Not dragging someone to the pole isn't voter suppression. Voter suppression is when someone goes to the poll to vote, but their vote is nullified by someone else who also casts a vote, but isn't eligible to do so. Or when your vote for candidate X is suppressed by someone else's TWO votes for candidate Y. Or when you're overseas in the military, and the administration in charge of doing things like getting your tallied votes communicated/transported in time to count in the election drops the ball, thus suppressing your vote. Voter suppression is when an organization seeks out college students to make sure that they're voting in both their own home district, and by absentee ballot in another district, thus suppressing other people's votes.
You know what's NOT suppression? Asking you to prove who you are when, once every couple or four years, you walk up to play a part in influencing the legislature, the executive, various referenda, and maybe even local judges under which other people also have to live. A thousand more routine and mundane things are more demanding when it comes to simply showing some ID. The notion that it's "suppressing" the vote to do LESS when you act to empower your preferred government is completely disingenuous crap, and everyone involved knows it.
You're incorrect. The difference is clearly defined in all countries I'm aware of where such restrictions apply.
If you can't see a difference between "Meet me at the docks after lunch and we will kill all the jews" and "I believe all jews ought to be killed" then that is your problem.
You're being obtuse, here. "Inciting" hatred is exactly something like "All Jews/Muslims/Christians/Musicians/Whatever ought to be killed." That's what's so awful about what they're doing, here. It's not about planning a killing. It's about, say, using your Mosque's web site to say that you think heretics should be done away with. That's inciting hatred among that web site's audience, right? It's not a plan, not a specific call to a specific action. And indeed it appears that in certain demographics, that sort of talk fits right in with a widely held urge to go out and kill people. But the problem is there are other demographics that don't seem to have that cultural problem, and won't react to an identically worded (other than swapping out "Jew" for, say, "Atheist" or "Catholic" or "Cartoonist") phrase the same way. And these governments are looking to set up a structure in which such speech is illegal.
Just because way too many Muslims can't restrain themselves from being violent doesn't mean that we need to make it illegal for another group to express their opinions. So we should err on the side of allowing even dimwitted, medieval-minded backwards Imams to say what they will (unless they are calling for a specific violent act), and just shout them down. Right now, they're being coddled in their police-are-afraid-to-go-there enclaves in places like France, and THAT is the problem. Not freedom of speech.
Ethical people cannot win elections. Psychopaths and lucky idiots do OK. Good people (not evil) do not seek power over others.
Some people seek office in order to reign in those who've been doing the over-reaching. Not everybody wants to be the Nanny in the Nanny State, but some people sure do. That wouldn't matter, of course, if so many people didn't want a Nanny in the first place.
the problem is in their culture, not in their genes
In practical terms, kids who are marinated in hate while being kept deliberately free of useful information and critical thinking skills turn out to be adults who are permanently different - in the way they process new information, in the way they react, in their motivations, and in how they perpetuate that culture - from others. And the difference manifests itself in the sorts of real-life behavior that we're watching play out, right now. Yes, it's a cultural problem. But it might as well be genetic for as entrenched as it is, and the impact is has on the behavior of millions of people.
It matters in a sense that identifying the root cause correctly helps deal with the problem more efficiently, and prevent the re-occurrence of the same problem in the future.
You're still trying too hard. The root cause of this problem is a desire on the part of millions of people to see the world run according to their oppressively misogynistic, apocolyptically theocratic, thug-centric vision. You don't need to be a thorough student of history to know that people like that, who are willing to machine gun rooms full of students to make their point, aren't ever talked out of their world view. It's too late for that. They have to be shut down.
Talking about Caliphates and Sharia Law, etc. is kind of playing into the hands of Islamists, who while claiming to be fighting for long-ago Islamic culture, are actually the product of post Cold-War international politics.
It doesn't matter what they're a product of. What matters is their vision for the future and the actual actions they take. THEY are the ones talking about Caliphates and Sharia, and they're the ones happy to slaughter innocents in order to establish what they want. It isn't, and doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
It doesn't matter if a culture that considers it better to burn a teacher alive than to let her instruct girls in reading and writing is wanting things to be like they were centuries ago, or if they simply want illiterate girls for the sake of keeping them illiterate. It doesn't matter. What matters is that they're acting to make it so.
Government funding that's in keeping with the constitutionally defined role of the government is appropriate. Taking tax money and spending it on one artist's political statements so that the administration choosing to spend that money can use your money (if you actually pay taxes) and the power of government to amplify that artist's politics is not appropriate, and certainly not "the same."
Its easy to villify those that aren't in your tribe or faith, but they are human beings just like you.
No, people who hold the coats for their more activist brothers as they burn teachers alive for teaching girls to reads are not human beings just like me. That you feel they are just like you is nauseating, though. Please go away.
So a "perfectly reasonable use of a common idiom" is the constant threats and actual violence done against abortion clinics?
Are you actually that obtuse, or are you just pretending to be? You really think that the phrase "knock some sense into" is to be construed as a threat against abortion clinics?
Will you admit that these attacks were only a particular extremist subset of those who call themselves muslim?
No, I'll characterize the attacks as exactly in keeping with a very large (and growing), well-funded, technically astute religious organization that is now controlling large swaths of territory, training foreigners with clean passports on how to do more of the same, and NOT being shut down by the quiet, indulgent majority of their fellow Muslims. If the billions of Muslims in the world wanted their militantly activist branch to stop slaughtering people, they could stop it immediately. But since countries that are run by that religion at the government level are not only refusing to do so, but are egging them on... no, I'd say that you're asking me to "admit" to a deliberate lie on your part. That doesn't seem very constructive.
Why were they not taken out with some kind of sleep darts instead of lead bullets?
Because "sleep darts" don't work in real life like they do in bad movies. These guys are holding hostages at gunpoint and swearing they're going to go down shooting. The cops didn't want another Sidney, where the crazy Islamist wackadoo had time (it only takes a moment, right?) to kill a hostage before being incapacitated.
Irony: right-wingers complaining about left-wingers painting them as violent lunatics and then threatening them with violence.
No, "irony" is a pretentious sounding lefty doing his best to sound intellectually superior to other people while simultaneously failing to recognize the perfectly reasonable use of a common idiom. The "knock" in this case is the attack by Islamists on a paragon of lefty publishing. The rhetorical question involved is whether said liberals are still so obtuse that even an event that head-knocking could fail to move them from their assertion that it was the writers and artists who are to blame for their deaths, not the Islamist wackadoos who planned and carried out their murders.
Conservatives did try to murder the NEA [arts.gov] over that!
Actually, I believe they tried to stop the government from forcing people to pay for having such art made. Some people saw the creation of Piss Christ as being outside the role of the federal government. Crazy, I know.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the part where organizations and individuals can contribute unlimited funds in "campaign contributions" to candidates
This is factually incorrect. But even ignoring that, why do you have it in quotes? Are you saying that candidates, whose personal and business financial records are highly scrutinized and completely available to auditors with local, state, and federal election officials and prosecutors (if need be) are taking money paid into campaign funds (which are completely open to inspection as public records) and personally running off with it? That's big news if you know of actual examples, since politicians who do that sort of thing are held criminally liable, and go to jail.
What should be illegal is politicians taking large sums of money from these "lobbyists"
So I'll ask you the same question as I did the GP. Do you have evidence of politicians taking large sums of money and not being prosecuted for that? As an example, the former governor of Virginia is about to go jail for doing that. Prosecutors are standing by to pursue other politicians who do the same. Which politicians do you know of who are taking large sums of money and not being prosecuted? Please list them.
Or are you referring to donations to campaigns, which have to be reported, publicly, down to the penny - as the money comes into the campaign fund, as as each penny is spent. Are you aware of politicians who are personally raiding those campaign funds and not being prosecuted? It does happen sometimes, that idiot politicians get greedy and hit those funds. And the audit trail makes that plainly obvious, and they are prosecuted. If you know of cases where they've taken such cash out of their campaign funds, but prosecutors are not aware, why aren't you saying something about it?
politicians are supposed to do whats best for the people they represent, not what's best for whoever can pay them the most money!
That sounds pretty serious! Which politicians are taking the money? If you have new information, it will be front page news tomorrow. Because that means that you've identified people who are someone handling money that career auditors with local, state, and federal election commissions are unable to see, even though they have complete access to the bank records, tax filings, and other information for every one of them. You must have some serious inside scoop! Please, share.
It's not checks and balances if the entire goal of the House is to make the President fail.
But it's OK with you if the entire purpose of the Senate is to make the House Of Representatives fail?
The entire purpose of our structure of government is to make it adversarial. That IS checks and balances. You conveniently forget things that actually do get passed and signed, and focus only on your frustration when the agenda of one person is disliked by a majority of the people in the country, and by congress. That's the whole point. If I were elected to an executive branch office, and said out loud that my entire agenda would be to do things you, personally, find deplorable, wouldn't you want to see that agenda fail? No? You'd like to see the agenda you dislike succeed? Why is that?
Just because the previous President fucked the goose doesn't mean that your party can't strive to learn the mistakes of the past and do better.
Again, that's the whole point. The current president is putting on a display of policy absurdity and stunning lack of competency - and so of course the legislative branch (including many in his own party) are pushing back against his positions. The majority of the country profoundly dislikes the health care finance law they rammed through on 100% partisan grounds. The majority of the country find his foreign policy positions to be complete feckless, and clumsily handled even if they approve of them. The point is that exactly such things were plainly going to happen given his ideology and stated positions on a wide spectrum of things. People saw that while he was first campaigning for office. You're suggesting that despite knowing he was going to be a disaster, and despite there being very good reasons to oppose most of his positions on everything within his constitutional purview (as well as the things he's doing that are well outside his role), that everyone should just go along for the ride? Gotta love that about the lefties: "We should all get along a work in the spirit of compromise, by doing what we say." No. Obama and his party have solidly earned the opposition they've cultivated, and the recent mid-term election demonstrates once again how tone deaf they've been. Opposition to them as they acted in that mode isn't a problem, it's a solution.
the House of Representatives has been under GOP control since 2010, which is the last time he could get bills through a friendly Congress.
Yeah, it's called "checks and balances."
He's had the Senate all that time, until he lost it. And he used THAT friendly house of congress to make sure that anything he didn't like, but didn't want to be seen vetoing, died on Harry Reid's desk. It goes both ways. The GOP had one house of congress, and Obama had the other house of congress and his own veto power to kill anything he didn't like that came out of that lower house. We don't elect a president to make laws, we elect him to EXECUTE the laws after the legislature has created them. That's why we have a legislative branch, and an executive branch. And a good thing, too.
Lobbying is just another word for bribery. This used to be illegal and I'm not sure how or why it became legal in the first place.
Your right to bring your concerns to your elected representatives and executives is preserved, very carefully and deliberately, in the constitution. Likewise is your right to assemble in a group to get things done.
... net neutrality? gun control? immigration? whatever) should be illegal? Why do you think that? "Lobbying" is the act (historically) of waiting in the lobby of a building to for a moment to bend the ear of a passing legislator on his or her way between other engagements. Hence the term. You're thinking that should be illegal?
So, you think that a visit to your congressional representative's office to explain your position on (pick a topic
Or are you just not happy when you and ten of your friends who share a common interest designate one of you to make the trip to that same office to speak on behalf of the other nine of you, as a group? Is that the part you think should be illegal? How about when you and your ten friends realize that there's actually a million of you that have a common interest, and you decide to pool some resources and hire someone who lives and works in the state or federal capital, and who knows who and where everything is and how it all works, to explain your collective position and priorities to that same congressman? Is that the part that should be illegal? Why? Which part is the illegal part - where a million of you act in concert, or where you finally realize that having a professional pull your agenda together into a coherent, easily conveyed whole means that you hire someone for that role? Please be specific about which thing you'd make illegal:
1) Gathering in groups?
2) Pooling resources?
3) Hiring someone?
4) Talking to congressional representatives or regulators?
At which point is someone bribing somebody else? Do you mean that the congress person is actually taking cash under the table? Do you have evidence of that happening, and it not resulting in prosecution? If you do, why are you keeping it from the FEC and the other agencies that investigate such crimes?
Or is it that you just don't like the fact that people who run businesses decide to take some of their money and hire professionals to reduce the overall noise level and represent their interests in a more focused way? Do you not like that because you can't be bothered to identify a suitably large group of people who share your own interests, and who do exactly the same thing? Millions of other people do - do you think that the NAACP, or the AARP, or the Sierra Club, or the NRA, or labor unions or other groups should be barred from taking their concerns to their elected representatives in a unified way, instead of expecting all of their thousands or millions of members to descend on the same congressional office individually, all day every day, to say the same things?
This tends to drive language purists insane. They seem to endlessly complain when popular "made up" words get added to the dictionary, without really stopping to consider that every single word in the dictionary was "made up" at some point in history, as was every grammar rule in existence.
Most complaints about change in language aren't about the introduction of some new meme-ish neologism or term that's sprung into use. The real (and justified) complaints are about changes that reflect a reduction in clarity, or which make expression surrounding critical thinking or subtlety less fashionable or in real terms more difficult. Changes in language that dumb communication down should indeed be fought against, and loudly. Giving in to the habits of the incurious, the poor communicators, and the lazy is just a way to make more of them.
Voter suppression is asking you to give up two hours of work to go and get the ID then making you have to wait in line for 6 hours to actually vote because their is not enough people hired for the booth,
How have you been functioning in daily life without a form of ID? Do you never write a check, never receive any sort of government service, deposit no checks because you have no checking account, etc? Is getting a photo ID once really that much of a hardship? How much time are you REALLY wasting, every day, if you can't have been bothered anywhere along the line in your entire life to have arranged to get something like a debit card connected to the money you spend? Someone who doesn't participate in any way in the banking system is going to be going inefficiently through life at every turn, traveling everywhere to use cash and have cashier's checks made for every bill paid through the mail ... and you're considering it "voter suppression" for them to take the time involved once to get a photo ID?
And if your local municipality is such a hotbed of active voting but can't raise enough taxes to have more than one voting machine or more than a couple of poll workers on election day (to make the process more efficient), and all of those anxious, busy voters are much too busy for any of them to actually volunteer to help at the polling place, who exactly are you blaming? Is everything about every aspect of the costs and effort involved in running local election logistics always someone else's problem? People who bitch about that and yet do nothing to (with years of opportunity in advance) to actually make their local system work better are the ones making their own lives inconvenient - because they'd rather whine about it than step up, in the absence of paying more taxes (like everyone else) to fund more equipment and staff. You vote for a president once ever four years. A senator once every six. Is turnout for the generally sleepier local elections (school board, etc) really resulting in six hour waits, year in, year out, at your local library or school? I call BS. And if it happens once in several years, and that's just too much for you to stand, run for local office yourself, on the platform of spending more of your fellow local citizens' money on running more well-oiled local election machinery. Local election places are generally staffed by volunteers - and your complaint is there aren't enough people showing up to help. And you're calling that "voter suppression," presumably by some evil rich white guy somewhere else? What a joke.
That has the be the most un-American sentiment you could ever make. Voter suppression...
Stop it. Not dragging someone to the pole isn't voter suppression. Voter suppression is when someone goes to the poll to vote, but their vote is nullified by someone else who also casts a vote, but isn't eligible to do so. Or when your vote for candidate X is suppressed by someone else's TWO votes for candidate Y. Or when you're overseas in the military, and the administration in charge of doing things like getting your tallied votes communicated/transported in time to count in the election drops the ball, thus suppressing your vote. Voter suppression is when an organization seeks out college students to make sure that they're voting in both their own home district, and by absentee ballot in another district, thus suppressing other people's votes.
You know what's NOT suppression? Asking you to prove who you are when, once every couple or four years, you walk up to play a part in influencing the legislature, the executive, various referenda, and maybe even local judges under which other people also have to live. A thousand more routine and mundane things are more demanding when it comes to simply showing some ID. The notion that it's "suppressing" the vote to do LESS when you act to empower your preferred government is completely disingenuous crap, and everyone involved knows it.
You're incorrect. The difference is clearly defined in all countries I'm aware of where such restrictions apply.
If you can't see a difference between "Meet me at the docks after lunch and we will kill all the jews" and "I believe all jews ought to be killed" then that is your problem.
You're being obtuse, here. "Inciting" hatred is exactly something like "All Jews/Muslims/Christians/Musicians/Whatever ought to be killed." That's what's so awful about what they're doing, here. It's not about planning a killing. It's about, say, using your Mosque's web site to say that you think heretics should be done away with. That's inciting hatred among that web site's audience, right? It's not a plan, not a specific call to a specific action. And indeed it appears that in certain demographics, that sort of talk fits right in with a widely held urge to go out and kill people. But the problem is there are other demographics that don't seem to have that cultural problem, and won't react to an identically worded (other than swapping out "Jew" for, say, "Atheist" or "Catholic" or "Cartoonist") phrase the same way. And these governments are looking to set up a structure in which such speech is illegal.
Just because way too many Muslims can't restrain themselves from being violent doesn't mean that we need to make it illegal for another group to express their opinions. So we should err on the side of allowing even dimwitted, medieval-minded backwards Imams to say what they will (unless they are calling for a specific violent act), and just shout them down. Right now, they're being coddled in their police-are-afraid-to-go-there enclaves in places like France, and THAT is the problem. Not freedom of speech.
Is that a joke about the vagaries of English spelling/pronounciation (rough, through, bough, etc)
Fank you for having more of a clue than a few other folks, apparently!
Ethical people cannot win elections. Psychopaths and lucky idiots do OK. Good people (not evil) do not seek power over others.
Some people seek office in order to reign in those who've been doing the over-reaching. Not everybody wants to be the Nanny in the Nanny State, but some people sure do. That wouldn't matter, of course, if so many people didn't want a Nanny in the first place.
the problem is in their culture, not in their genes
In practical terms, kids who are marinated in hate while being kept deliberately free of useful information and critical thinking skills turn out to be adults who are permanently different - in the way they process new information, in the way they react, in their motivations, and in how they perpetuate that culture - from others. And the difference manifests itself in the sorts of real-life behavior that we're watching play out, right now. Yes, it's a cultural problem. But it might as well be genetic for as entrenched as it is, and the impact is has on the behavior of millions of people.
It matters in a sense that identifying the root cause correctly helps deal with the problem more efficiently, and prevent the re-occurrence of the same problem in the future.
You're still trying too hard. The root cause of this problem is a desire on the part of millions of people to see the world run according to their oppressively misogynistic, apocolyptically theocratic, thug-centric vision. You don't need to be a thorough student of history to know that people like that, who are willing to machine gun rooms full of students to make their point, aren't ever talked out of their world view. It's too late for that. They have to be shut down.
Thuft.
It ought to be the Noughties
Except that's pronounced "Nawftees." Just doesn't work.
Talking about Caliphates and Sharia Law, etc. is kind of playing into the hands of Islamists, who while claiming to be fighting for long-ago Islamic culture, are actually the product of post Cold-War international politics.
It doesn't matter what they're a product of. What matters is their vision for the future and the actual actions they take. THEY are the ones talking about Caliphates and Sharia, and they're the ones happy to slaughter innocents in order to establish what they want. It isn't, and doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
It doesn't matter if a culture that considers it better to burn a teacher alive than to let her instruct girls in reading and writing is wanting things to be like they were centuries ago, or if they simply want illiterate girls for the sake of keeping them illiterate. It doesn't matter. What matters is that they're acting to make it so.
Except that 4 hostages did actually die.
Not during the raid to free the rest. That's the whole point.
Government funding is Government funding.
No, it's not.
Government funding that's in keeping with the constitutionally defined role of the government is appropriate. Taking tax money and spending it on one artist's political statements so that the administration choosing to spend that money can use your money (if you actually pay taxes) and the power of government to amplify that artist's politics is not appropriate, and certainly not "the same."
Its easy to villify those that aren't in your tribe or faith, but they are human beings just like you.
No, people who hold the coats for their more activist brothers as they burn teachers alive for teaching girls to reads are not human beings just like me. That you feel they are just like you is nauseating, though. Please go away.
So a "perfectly reasonable use of a common idiom" is the constant threats and actual violence done against abortion clinics?
Are you actually that obtuse, or are you just pretending to be? You really think that the phrase "knock some sense into" is to be construed as a threat against abortion clinics?
Will you admit that these attacks were only a particular extremist subset of those who call themselves muslim?
No, I'll characterize the attacks as exactly in keeping with a very large (and growing), well-funded, technically astute religious organization that is now controlling large swaths of territory, training foreigners with clean passports on how to do more of the same, and NOT being shut down by the quiet, indulgent majority of their fellow Muslims. If the billions of Muslims in the world wanted their militantly activist branch to stop slaughtering people, they could stop it immediately. But since countries that are run by that religion at the government level are not only refusing to do so, but are egging them on ... no, I'd say that you're asking me to "admit" to a deliberate lie on your part. That doesn't seem very constructive.
The Government funds a lot of things that offend *someone* - my mother thinks grants that study oceanic algae blooms...
Do you consider a grant to study algae blooms to be a form of politicized artistic expression? No? Apples/Oranges.
Brilliant observation.
Why were they not taken out with some kind of sleep darts instead of lead bullets?
Because "sleep darts" don't work in real life like they do in bad movies. These guys are holding hostages at gunpoint and swearing they're going to go down shooting. The cops didn't want another Sidney, where the crazy Islamist wackadoo had time (it only takes a moment, right?) to kill a hostage before being incapacitated.
Irony: right-wingers complaining about left-wingers painting them as violent lunatics and then threatening them with violence.
No, "irony" is a pretentious sounding lefty doing his best to sound intellectually superior to other people while simultaneously failing to recognize the perfectly reasonable use of a common idiom. The "knock" in this case is the attack by Islamists on a paragon of lefty publishing. The rhetorical question involved is whether said liberals are still so obtuse that even an event that head-knocking could fail to move them from their assertion that it was the writers and artists who are to blame for their deaths, not the Islamist wackadoos who planned and carried out their murders.
Conservatives did try to murder the NEA [arts.gov] over that!
Actually, I believe they tried to stop the government from forcing people to pay for having such art made. Some people saw the creation of Piss Christ as being outside the role of the federal government. Crazy, I know.