for every informed criticism of his policy, there's nine other people just tossing out crude insults because he's not a Democratic-style leftist.
That must be why he's getting so much criticism from Republicans finally. Seriously, you're laughable. First, you think the Democrats are leftists when they're mainly moderately right wing with a few left fascists thrown in. Second, your best attempt at a point even then was screeching out "leftist".
I generally find the level of political discourse to be pretty childish and crude, not well-thought-out at all.
I agree, but I wonder if you actually don't realise that you're a part of the problem?
The great British tradition is to go somewhere foreign, get utterly wasted, and then trash it. How you could forget that, especially with your nick, is beyond me!
Great Flying Spaghetti Monster with a side of garlic bread my good man!
The great British tradition is to go somewhere foreign, get utterly wasted, *get naked* and then trash the palce. Sheesh.
The topic is about pumping water out of New Orleans, what the fuck does this quote have to do with the current topic?
It has to do with the *fact* that Bush stole money that was earmarked for preventing this exact disaster and used it to fund his personal crusade to make his rich friends richer. That is entirely on topic because had that money gone where it was supposed to, then quite possibly it could be 8 weeks, or even 7.
Add in the fact that a crapload of the people who are over in Iraq pursuing Bush's imperial ambitions are *The freaking people who are trained to aid in these types of situations*.
Nothing, so let's stop trying to politicize this and try to blame Bush.
Blaming Bush is not politicizing shit. Unless, that is, you are saying that it is a fundamental Republican characteristic to rob the American people to pay their rich friends and shirk their personal responsibility to protect the American people.
If you are saying that, then fine.
Otherwise, calling somebody on the actions that they chose to take (and in *fact* directly lied and manipulated the country into going along with) which directly added to the scale of this disaster is called common sense. It's called being honest. It's called showing integrity.
What it is not in any way imaginable is a political issue.
Your defense of him is entirely political on the other hand. It is clear by now to every honest person what a disaster Bush's presidency has been. Those like you who are too cowardly to admit you were wrong now just declare any *fact* that paints him in a negative light as politicizing the issue.
As long as idiotic party followers like yourself do everything they can to refuse to allow our elected officials to actually face any real criticism for their real mistakes we will be more and more fucked as time goes by.
Thanks for doing your part to fuck the country, asshole!
a.) Actually, it is the east coast of the oceans the ones that have the hurricanes... That is why europe and California may see heavy rain but not hurricanes.
I guess you're forgetting a few years back when there were at least two hurricanes in the Pacific. Early on, they were rated as a potential threat to San Diego. One of them went up the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) and flooded Yuma, Arizona.
In fact, there are not many (if any) citizens in Cuba and Venezuela that surpass the financial level of their govts. In contrast, here in the USA, there are more private citizens financially better off than the members of the govt. Hell, you add of the top few hundred USA citizens wealth and they surpass what the legislative body of the govt. makes.
Since the richest in the US then get to basically tell the government what to do, you aren't demonstrating much of a real difference here. That's why IMHO Libertarianism can't work economically (I'm not the one who said that originally, but anyhow). To maintain a healthy market, a healthy economy, and a healthy society, I think that some level of government intervention is necessary. I think it is blatantly obvious and has been demonstrated so many times that anybody still pushing Laissez-Faire is either pretty well uninformed or they're trying to fuck me.
As greater wealth accumulates in fewer hands, those with it will tend to use it to fuck everybody else. That's human nature sad but true.
Of course both the Democrat and the Republican parties are totally fucked, so I voted for Badnarik in the last election even though I don't think his economic policies are really workable.
IMHO our most important problem is getting rid of the 2 party system through voting reform. That would actually create the possibility for issues to be discussed by politicians in a sane manner rather than the Black/White polarized bullshit that passes for debate in this country these days.
The views of the Libertarian party at least come from a good place (individual liberty) so I think it's very important to get them out there even if I think following their economic policies whole hog would be a disaster.
Not sure there is a name for my idealogy or that I fit on any of the idealogy charts.
Yes. You are a moderately left-leaning Liberal.
In a nutshell, you have Liberals. They hold this truth to be self-evident: That all people are created equal. They believe in individual rights above all.
Then you have the left and the right. They are the same in the fact that they believe in the power of the state over individual liberty.
Right wing extremists like the current administration and their supporters do things like attempt to shove the Church into government to extend their control, pass amendments to the constitution to promote oppression of certain groups, start wars to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the very wealthy etc.
Left wing extremists like Stalin, Pol Pot, and that sort use the state to sort of equalize wealth, but it invariably has meant they get it all and a fuckload of people die. America doesn't have much of anybody to the extreme left. Mostly what we have on the so called American left are moderate right wingers and Left Fascists (see the Senator from Disney, the DMCA etc for examples of this particular type of shitbag).
The left agrees with the Liberals as to the fact of equality of all people but they feel it is necessary to use the power of the state to promote and enforce it. This is demonstrated in the worst case by Leninist/Stalinist type governments. Of course, it turns out even there that some people are more equal than others. It is demonstrated in the best case (IMHO) by things like the 13th amendment and some civil rights legislation.
The right disagrees with the Liberal belief that all people are equal and further they believe in using the power of the state to *prevent* this. This is why right wing parties are always the party of the wealthy elite.
So based upon how you described your political beliefs, you are a Liberal " I am a libertarian when it comes to personal freedoms"
But you do believe (as any sane person does at this point) that some level of governemnt influence is necessary to prevent the destruction of equality.
"Progressive only when it comes to the need to regulate and check big corporations and the rich, ".
So you are a moderately leftist Liberal. Welcome to the club:-)
Color me pleasantly surprised, and accept my apologies as well.
You seemed to be arguing, from these sources, that Fascism was/is a Christian or religious phenomenon, and that Hitler's anti-semitism was the result of Christian traditions, rather than the result of traditional European anti-semitism.
Not at all. All that I said was that it was "explicitly" Christian. I mean the whole history of humanity is mostly people using religion to fuck people interspersed with brief periods of people using other ideologies to fuck people.
As adopted by millions of religious Germans, Nazism may well have had a strong religious component. As conceived and founded by men like Hitler and Mussolini, it seems to have been a brilliant piece of atheistic cynicism.
Sure.
I think you somehow thought that I was saying that Christians are Fascists rather than the converse. And, of course 'Christian' in that environment means everybody from the truly devout to the guy who just doesn't want to get shot to the rotten bastards at the top who are just using it to pull strings. That's what happens when you make the religion part of the state.
Someone who contradicts me, without support, and then complains that I didn't research their contradiction, when it was so easy they should have done it themselves in the first place, and supported their own damn contradiction to begin with?
See, I just dumped the first result off of google after skimming it to make sure the basic facts were there etc. I'd read the other site before, but it's really long, so given how basic my statement was, I figured it'd suffice.
The Luther bit was just an example. There's no conspiracy theory. That sound bite is worthless already. Let it go.
Seriously, Dude. Think about it. We're talking about the real actual freaking Nazis. Not the ordinary dipshits who get called that these days. That's way past conspiracy theories.
Of course, you couldn't just settle down and give a strong argument, you had to complain that I hadn't found your supporting sources for you.
I didn't even have an argument. I stated a couple facts. The Luther business is interesting, but obscure.
The fact that any government that wants to assume complete control will merge with the Church and with industry is basic common knowledge or at least should be.
I mean, that's what we were fighting against in WW2, right?
There's little in the article to support the claim that Christianity produced Nazism. Rather, we have a clear picture of fascism producing a perversion of Christianity.
Anyway, so what?
So what is that that is exactly what you were so fervently denying. The point that you wasted so much time attempting to weasel out of in the first place which was the entire purpose of my post.
It doesn't matter one shit what you think is good Christian or a bastardization of Christianity.
The simple undisputable fact which according to your subsequent posts, you now know is that the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
So can I get a "You were right, I was wrong. Thank you for enlightening me on this major piece of history which I was so utterly clueless about regardless of how important it is to an understanding of current events and of the commonly used role of religion in society." Or are you just going to keep being a dick about it?
Given your history and the fact that it took this long for to admit to something which is a very well known (and easy to validate) historical fact I'm betting on the dick thing.
Informative my ass. Nazi Germany was explicitly and militantly Christian.
The holocaust was, in fact, the culmination of the dreams of Martin Luther. Here's a brief description Kristalnacht was carried out on his birthday.
It is certainly a popular mythology that the Nazis were godless heathens, but it doesn't stand up to reality at all in any way. One of the most primary aspects of fascism is a merger of the church and the state. Please try to have at least some knowledge of the subject no matter how tiny before you comment on it. Spreading ignorant lies doesn't help anything.
Plus, people do not live their lives in a vacuum, the affects of the drug addict have an effect on the taxes I pay...that is unless we become completely heartless and let these people rot with starvation, but even then they must be disposed of somehow. There are other examples, but allowing free-flow drug use is probably not a good idea.
No offense intended, but this argument is really full of holes, ignores the most important issues and completely misses where the tax costs are coming from.
In the first place, a large portion of your taxes go to pay to enforce these drug laws which have no possibility of ever having any positive effect whatsoever. When you make drugs (or anything else that a very large percentage of people want) illegal, there are very consistent and well understood effects. First, organized crime takes off like crazy. This leads to a tremendous increase in violence. Second, we end up with more people in prison per capita *and in raw numbers* than anywhere else in the world. These people have to be supported in prison, and then once they get out with a lot of their potential destroyed and a greatly increased training in crime, they are out on the street again with far less of a chance of making it legitimately than they did previously.
Then also, with the push for privatization of prisons in the last decade or so coupled with the increasingly fascist nature of the US government (don't bitch about my using that term, look up the word figure out what it actually means and you will see that it is absolutely an appropriate description) you have a very wealthy industry that was created almost entirely by drug laws that can only increase it's profits by lobbying for more laws to allow them to put more Americans in jail.
All of these are additional costs that we are forced to pay that are directly attributable not to drugs, but to drug laws.
If we actually took a tiny bit of the money we waste on building a police state and put it into treatment and *honest* educational programs and took away the drug laws which create 90+% of the problems then there wouldn't be an issue and we would be much better off in every way than we are now. Think about it. Drug crime would be gone. There's no reason to believe that the laws have effected usage at all, hance no reason to believe that they would change because the laws went away.
Seriously, when you think about this issue, take anything that your initial thoughts indicates is a problem with drugs and ask yourself if the problem would be anywhere near as serious if there weren't those drug laws in effect. Ask if that problem would even exist without the drug laws.
Christian-Judism has always had a strong influence on America the influence is less and les each year.
This wasn't really true up until WW2. Then with the threat of the "godless communists", for the first time the wealthy elite (Republican Party) managed to ally themselves with the religious Americans. This relationship has proven very profitable for the wealthy elite, but hasn't really done crap for the religious people since they have allied themselves with the party whose goals are the diametric opposite of their own. Here is a really nice analysis of why this is true..
It's sad, but it's hardly the first time that religious people have willingly been duped and used against their own beliefs.
Do you think the ten commandants were recently put up in court houses?
In fact, I do. Because they were. Largely as a promotional item for the movie of the same name. Same site, different essay.
Take any shred of religion out of the government, but don't tell me our forefathers or constitution says it should be that way.
It is really quite explicit about that. Anybody who actually believes in their religion would be far more adamant about keeping that seperation strong than somebody who merely knows it's a good idea. Their religion can *only* be corrupted by any merger between the state and religion.
For examples, please see the entirety of human history.
I also believe federal legislation is counterproductive, and that individual states should have different rules.
In general, I'm probably pretty much in agreement with you on this one. I do feel that the federal government has a responsibility to make sure that states don't take away rights which are specifically guaranteed in the constitution. So, for example, I think (some) anti-discrimination laws are good and (sadly) necessary.
I probably wouldn't lump abortion in there as there will for the forseeable future always be states where it is legal.
In our nation right now, the she is all-powerful and the fetus has essentially no rights. I think this balance is very wrong.
I think this balance is right, and further, I don't see how it is possible to have it any other way.
In the broadest sense, how could you ever grant a right to something that has never asked for it?
No fetus has ever expressed any sort of desire, thought, sentience, or anything of the sort.
Given this, how could you decide what they want? How can you decide what is best for them?
I understand your argument, but my 2 major issues with it are: 1) It proposes giving weight to the thoughts and feelings of something that by definition doesn't have them. 2) Power will be removed from people over what goes on inside their own bodies, and it won't go to those who you propose need more as they are entirely unable to wield it. This power will go to somebody, and those people I don't trust at all (for any value of "those people"). Giving a state (as in US state, or as in Nation) that kind of power over the most intimate details of a person's life is totally inconsistent with the possibility of a free society.
I disagree. I think there are lots of options
All of which suffer from the problems above.
I think sex ed should start no sooner than 6th grade,
I'd say no later. I guess we hit a sweet spot on that one;-) I would hope that it would be totally unnecessary as the parents should certainly have handled it before then.
and should be a mandatory part of a larger health curriculum
Great. I'd also add a defense from mass media manipulation course as well.
I think it should be set down in print that the best way to avoid pregnancy and STD's is... not to have sex.
It's the truth, ain't it?
I have a problem when it is pushed as the only way and disinformation is spread deliberately though. As a matter of health, it's society's concern. As a matter of morality, that's up to the individual parent. So no teachers telling the kids how great it is either.
Also, when I was in high school I think a lot more people thought their friends were having sex -- that it was acceptable and desirable behavior -- than was actually the case,
Or maybe less thought so than was the case. As I think we agree on, it's largely the ignorance and disinformation that is the problem.
(Something inside me still says "if they're old enough to be having sex, they're old enough to be taking responsibility for themselves." But reality trumps my personal morality on this one.)
They totally should be. I think putting an emphasis on fixing the problem rather than punishing the victims ( whether the mother, the baby, or the fetus) would do more to help than laws that, in my mind, are inconceivably invasive.
IMHO, JP2 was wrong when he pushed so hard against birth control. One could reasonably argue that htis has resulted in genocide in Africa through the AIDS epidemic
So far so good. It is also arguable that it has caused continued poverty and even increased it.
The converse to those arguments are barely arguable at all though. There are very bizarre twists of reasoning that people often attempt to use, but the pro and con on those arguments are in no way on anything like an equal footing.
You were doing pretty well until you totally blew it here:
IMHO, JP2 was wrong when he pushed so hard against birth control. One could reasonably argue that htis has resulted in genocide in Africa through the AIDS epidemic
Of course he could have known and he did know. His disgusting policies with respect to one of the most fundamental of all human rights, the right to control when where and with who you choose to reproduce were pushed in the face of tremendous opposition from people of morals due to the fact that any theoretical benefit was nothing compared to the very real and well know liabilities in such immoral and unhuman policies.
Did the decision seem right to him and other Catholic leaders at the time? Yes.
Certainly, but what you are leaving out here is that the purpose of this policy as well as the purpose of any other policy instituted by the Catholic Church is intended for the primary purpose of maintaining and increasing the power of the Catholic Church. I'm really sorry you've made it this far in life without realising that that is an absolute fact of power structures. They inevitably seek to promote their own power. I'm certainly not singling the Catholic Church out on this one. It is an unavoidable fact of life though, so it would be better for everybody if you realised that, started looking at every situation with that fact in mind, and responding accordingly.
The alternative is you having "faith" that the pope really must have had the best interests of people in mind when he made decisions that had no other possible effects than those which everybody besides religious zealots predicted.
It was obvious what would happen with aids and poverty with the Catholic Church's inhuman policies. Were you able to step back and look rationally at the issue, it would be obvious to you as well and you wouldn't be attempting to apologize for the pope.
It's a basic rule of life. Watch the money, watch the power. There is your explanation. This holds in almost every single action taken by every single political or religious leader.
Was it right in hindsight? Probably not.
Oh where is there one single possible grain of doubt there?
I'd have to say absolutely positively with no doubt whatsoever. Turn it around. Say that you ban abortion. What you are doing by this is taking somebody who knows far more about their own abilities, personality and desires than you do. They know far more about their ability to raise a child than you do. They have a far better idea of what type of person they will be able to raise given their resources and prospects than you do.
You take this person, put a gun to their head, and tell them that they will be forced to spend 9 months "disabled" and then spend the next 18 years raising another person.
If this person fails to accomplish all of this to your satisfaction, they can then be sued or prosecuted over that. Even if they knew full well that they were in no way fit to be a parent and tried to take the moral course of not inflicting all of that suffering on society and upon their child.
Obviously abortion shouldn't be encouraged so what needs to be done is make sure that everybody is aware of how pregnancy occurs and what methods are available to prevent it (both basic simple biological facts).
But to pretend that a lump of cells should have *greater* rights than a living breathing person is utterly abhorent to the very concept of human rights.
The simple fact is that nobody can say absolutely what's best in all possible situations. The only possible way to be even remotely consistent is to leave the choice up to the one person who understands the issue and who will be overwhelmingly affected by it.
Should people be able to have abortions purely because of their lack of planning? I'm against it.
So where do you stand on the issue of sex education for schools? What about making condoms freely available to anybody of breeding age?
Typically (note, that's a word that includes the idea of "not always" i.e. possibly not you, so don't get your feathers all ruffled) people who take your position on the abotion issue take the diametrically opposed position on these. They feel none of that should be done. So they oppose abortions due to lack of planning while at the same time preventing people from being given the tools they need to actually do any planning. It's a really vicious and mean spirited game.
Should people be paid big bucks by research clinics to have abortions? Definitely not
I don't quite go so far as to suggest that those that attempt to do so shouldnt be allowed to continue to exist.
I do in theory. I have no idea how to code it into law in a way that would accomplish the goal (of preventing anybody from ever attempting anything so utterly fascist again) without totally trampling on real rights.
I mean seriously, they demonstrate complete and total disregard for the constitution, and the Liberal ideals that founded this country. The utter contempt they show for the *citizens* of this country to demand not only slave labor (we would be forced to work to pay their business expenses with no compensation) out of us, but then to get something that we already are paying for we have to pay again?
Why should we permit them to continue doing business given what they've demonstrated about themselves? If they manage to make a bit more money, then they'll just pay enough next time to get it passed. They have shown us that that is their business model. Given that, why should they be allowed to do business?
Not an issue. They are welcome to innovate. That's what the first part of my comment addressed.
Nobody is suggesting taking away their access to the data. They are suggesting taking away my access and still make me pay for it. Do you see the difference?
If they can do it, and be innovative enough that people are *willing* to pay for it, then great. They make some cash and people get a service they are happy with.
That is why innovation is totally irrelevant to this topic.
Slashdot Mirror
for every informed criticism of his policy, there's nine other people just tossing out crude insults because he's not a Democratic-style leftist.
That must be why he's getting so much criticism from Republicans finally.
Seriously, you're laughable.
First, you think the Democrats are leftists when they're mainly moderately right wing with a few left fascists thrown in.
Second, your best attempt at a point even then was screeching out "leftist".
I generally find the level of political discourse to be pretty childish and crude, not well-thought-out at all.
I agree, but I wonder if you actually don't realise that you're a part of the problem?
when Europe initially offered the US help, they were turned down - why? What the hell? What the hell is going on with Bush?
Dude, he refused aid from *Chicago*.
That's how fucked up this is.
Seriously, Dude.
Just look at his friends.
It also makes humans who ingest it more wreckless and therefore likely to get killed
So what you're telling us is that you can get high eating cat poop?!?
Wait 'til this news hits the streets. Am I going to have to booby trap the litter box?
Mr. Balmer may be a hot-head, but cream does rise to the top,
So does scum.
The great British tradition is to go somewhere foreign, get utterly wasted, and then trash it. How you could forget that, especially
with your nick, is beyond me!
Great Flying Spaghetti Monster with a side of garlic bread my good man!
The great British tradition is to go somewhere foreign, get utterly wasted, *get naked* and then trash the palce.
Sheesh.
My apology for the oversight, I hereby spit on Illinois.
;-)
Damn, dude. Keep that shit downstate. Leave Chicago out of it
The topic is about pumping water out of New Orleans, what the fuck does this quote have to do with the current topic?
It has to do with the *fact* that Bush stole money that was earmarked for preventing this exact disaster and used it to fund his personal crusade to make his rich friends richer.
That is entirely on topic because had that money gone where it was supposed to, then quite possibly it could be 8 weeks, or even 7.
Add in the fact that a crapload of the people who are over in Iraq pursuing Bush's imperial ambitions are *The freaking people who are trained to aid in these types of situations*.
Nothing, so let's stop trying to politicize this and try to blame Bush.
Blaming Bush is not politicizing shit.
Unless, that is, you are saying that it is a fundamental Republican characteristic to rob the American people to pay their rich friends and shirk their personal responsibility to protect the American people.
If you are saying that, then fine.
Otherwise, calling somebody on the actions that they chose to take (and in *fact* directly lied and manipulated the country into going along with)
which directly added to the scale of this disaster is called common sense. It's called being honest.
It's called showing integrity.
What it is not in any way imaginable is a political issue.
Your defense of him is entirely political on the other hand. It is clear by now to every honest person what a disaster Bush's presidency has been. Those like you who are too cowardly to admit you were wrong now just declare any *fact* that paints him in a negative light as politicizing the issue.
As long as idiotic party followers like yourself do everything they can to refuse to allow our elected officials to actually face any real criticism for their real mistakes we will be more and more fucked as time goes by.
Thanks for doing your part to fuck the country, asshole!
a.) Actually, it is the east coast of the oceans the ones that have the hurricanes... That is why europe and California may see heavy rain but not hurricanes.
I guess you're forgetting a few years back when there were at least two hurricanes in the Pacific. Early on, they were rated as a potential threat to San Diego. One of them went up the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) and flooded Yuma, Arizona.
In fact, there are not many (if any) citizens in Cuba and Venezuela that surpass the financial level of their govts. In contrast, here in the USA, there are more private citizens financially better off than the members of the govt. Hell, you add of the top few hundred USA citizens wealth and they surpass what the legislative body of the govt. makes.
Since the richest in the US then get to basically tell the government what to do, you aren't demonstrating much of a real difference here. That's why IMHO Libertarianism can't work economically (I'm not the one who said that originally, but anyhow).
To maintain a healthy market, a healthy economy, and a healthy society, I think that some level of government intervention is necessary.
I think it is blatantly obvious and has been demonstrated so many times that anybody still pushing Laissez-Faire is either pretty well uninformed or they're trying to fuck me.
As greater wealth accumulates in fewer hands, those with it will tend to use it to fuck everybody else. That's human nature sad but true.
Of course both the Democrat and the Republican parties are totally fucked, so I voted for Badnarik in the last election even though I don't think his economic policies are really workable.
IMHO our most important problem is getting rid of the 2 party system through voting reform. That would actually create the possibility for issues to be discussed by politicians in a sane manner rather than the Black/White polarized bullshit that passes for debate in this country these days.
The views of the Libertarian party at least come from a good place (individual liberty) so I think it's very important to get them out there even if I think following their economic policies whole hog would be a disaster.
Not sure there is a name for my idealogy or that I fit on any of the idealogy charts.
Yes. You are a moderately left-leaning Liberal.
In a nutshell, you have Liberals. They hold this truth to be self-evident: That all people are created equal.
They believe in individual rights above all.
Then you have the left and the right. They are the same in the fact that they believe in the power of the state over individual liberty.
Right wing extremists like the current administration and their supporters do things like attempt to shove the Church into government to extend their control, pass amendments to the constitution to promote oppression of certain groups, start wars to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the very wealthy etc.
Left wing extremists like Stalin, Pol Pot, and that sort use the state to sort of equalize wealth, but it invariably has meant they get it all and a fuckload of people die.
America doesn't have much of anybody to the extreme left. Mostly what we have on the so called American left are moderate right wingers and Left Fascists (see the Senator from Disney, the DMCA etc for examples of this particular type of shitbag).
The left agrees with the Liberals as to the fact of equality of all people but they feel it is necessary to use the power of the state to promote and enforce it. This is demonstrated in the worst case by Leninist/Stalinist type governments. Of course, it turns out even there that some people are more equal than others.
It is demonstrated in the best case (IMHO) by things like the 13th amendment and some civil rights legislation.
The right disagrees with the Liberal belief that all people are equal and further they believe in using the power of the state to *prevent* this.
This is why right wing parties are always the party of the wealthy elite.
So based upon how you described your political beliefs, you are a Liberal " I am a libertarian when it comes to personal freedoms"
But you do believe (as any sane person does at this point) that some level of governemnt influence is necessary to prevent the destruction of equality.
"Progressive only when it comes to the need to regulate and check big corporations and the rich, ".
So you are a moderately leftist Liberal.
Welcome to the club:-)
Color me pleasantly surprised, and accept my apologies as well.
You seemed to be arguing, from these sources, that Fascism was/is a Christian or religious phenomenon, and that Hitler's anti-semitism was the result of Christian traditions, rather than the result of traditional European anti-semitism.
Not at all. All that I said was that it was "explicitly" Christian.
I mean the whole history of humanity is mostly people using religion to fuck people interspersed with brief periods of people using other ideologies to fuck people.
As adopted by millions of religious Germans, Nazism may well have had a strong religious component. As conceived and founded by men like Hitler and Mussolini, it seems to have been a brilliant piece of atheistic cynicism.
Sure.
I think you somehow thought that I was saying that Christians are Fascists rather than the converse.
And, of course 'Christian' in that environment means everybody from the truly devout to the guy who just doesn't want to get shot to the rotten bastards at the top who are just using it to pull strings. That's what happens when you make the religion part of the state.
Someone who contradicts me, without support, and then complains that I didn't research their contradiction, when it was so easy they should have done it themselves in the first place, and supported their own damn contradiction to begin with?
See, I just dumped the first result off of google after skimming it to make sure the basic facts were there etc. I'd read the other site before, but it's really long, so given how basic my statement was, I figured it'd suffice.
The Luther bit was just an example.
There's no conspiracy theory. That sound bite is worthless already. Let it go.
Seriously, Dude. Think about it. We're talking about the real actual freaking Nazis. Not the ordinary dipshits who get called that these days.
That's way past conspiracy theories.
Of course, you couldn't just settle down and give a strong argument, you had to complain that I hadn't found your supporting sources for you.
I didn't even have an argument. I stated a couple facts. The Luther business is interesting, but obscure.
The fact that any government that wants to assume complete control will merge with the Church and with industry is basic common knowledge or at least should be.
I mean, that's what we were fighting against in WW2, right?
In fact my little brother can't even eat candies, which are made of milk, without vomiting the rest of the day.
;-)
Heh. Well at least we know what you do to him when he pisses you off
There's little in the article to support the claim that Christianity produced Nazism. Rather, we have a clear picture of fascism producing a perversion of Christianity.
Anyway, so what?
So what is that that is exactly what you were so fervently denying.
The point that you wasted so much time attempting to weasel out of in the first place which was the entire purpose of my post.
It doesn't matter one shit what you think is good Christian or a bastardization of Christianity.
The simple undisputable fact which according to your subsequent posts, you now know is that the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
So can I get a "You were right, I was wrong. Thank you for enlightening me on this major piece of history which I was so utterly clueless about regardless of how important it is to an understanding of current events and of the commonly used role of religion in society."
Or are you just going to keep being a dick about it?
Given your history and the fact that it took this long for to admit to something which is a very well known (and easy to validate) historical fact I'm betting on the dick thing.
Give me a break. The X-Files has more plausible conspiracy theories than you do.
It's a conspiracy theory that you're too stupid to use google?
Here's a more complete article with plenty of references.
Knock yourself out, but you're just making yourself look silly by trying to deny basic historical facts.
Nazi Germany.
Informative my ass. Nazi Germany was explicitly and militantly Christian.
The holocaust was, in fact, the culmination of the dreams of Martin Luther. Here's a brief description
Kristalnacht was carried out on his birthday.
It is certainly a popular mythology that the Nazis were godless heathens, but it doesn't stand up to reality at all in any way. One of the most primary aspects of fascism is a merger of the church and the state. Please try to have at least some knowledge of the subject no matter how tiny before you comment on it. Spreading ignorant lies doesn't help anything.
Plus, people do not live their lives in a vacuum, the affects of the drug addict have an effect on the taxes I pay...that is unless we become completely heartless and let these people rot with starvation, but even then they must be disposed of somehow. There are other examples, but allowing free-flow drug use is probably not a good idea.
No offense intended, but this argument is really full of holes, ignores the most important issues and completely misses where the tax costs are coming from.
In the first place, a large portion of your taxes go to pay to enforce these drug laws which have no possibility of ever having any positive effect whatsoever. When you make drugs (or anything else that a very large percentage of people want) illegal, there are very consistent and well understood effects. First, organized crime takes off like crazy. This leads to a tremendous increase in violence. Second, we end up with more people in prison per capita *and in raw numbers* than anywhere else in the world. These people have to be supported in prison, and then once they get out with a lot of their potential destroyed and a greatly increased training in crime, they are out on the street again with far less of a chance of making it legitimately than they did previously.
Then also, with the push for privatization of prisons in the last decade or so coupled with the increasingly fascist nature of the US government (don't bitch about my using that term, look up the word figure out what it actually means and you will see that it is absolutely an appropriate description) you have a very wealthy industry that was created almost entirely by drug laws that can only increase it's profits by lobbying for more laws to allow them to put more Americans in jail.
All of these are additional costs that we are forced to pay that are directly attributable not to drugs, but to drug laws.
If we actually took a tiny bit of the money we waste on building a police state and put it into treatment and *honest* educational programs and took away the drug laws which create 90+% of the problems then there wouldn't be an issue and we would be much better off in every way than we are now. Think about it. Drug crime would be gone. There's no reason to believe that the laws have effected usage at all, hance no reason to believe that they would change because the laws went away.
Seriously, when you think about this issue, take anything that your initial thoughts indicates is a problem with drugs and ask yourself if the problem would be anywhere near as serious if there weren't those drug laws in effect. Ask if that problem would even exist without the drug laws.
Christian-Judism has always had a strong influence on America the influence is less and les each year.
This wasn't really true up until WW2. Then with the threat of the "godless communists", for the first time the wealthy elite (Republican Party) managed to ally themselves with the religious Americans. This relationship has proven very profitable for the wealthy elite, but hasn't really done crap for the religious people since they have allied themselves with the party whose goals are the diametric opposite of their own. Here is a really nice analysis of why this is true..
It's sad, but it's hardly the first time that religious people have willingly been duped and used against their own beliefs.
Do you think the ten commandants were recently put up in court houses?
In fact, I do. Because they were. Largely as a promotional item for the movie of the same name.
Same site, different essay.
Take any shred of religion out of the government, but don't tell me our forefathers or constitution says it should be that way.
It is really quite explicit about that.
Anybody who actually believes in their religion would be far more adamant about keeping that seperation strong than somebody who merely knows it's a good idea. Their religion can *only* be corrupted by any merger between the state and religion.
For examples, please see the entirety of human history.
I'm sorry, I believe that you have been misinformed ;-)
Samhain was the band that Glenn Danzig formed after the Misfits broke up.
I also believe federal legislation is counterproductive, and that individual states should have different rules.
;-) I would hope that it would be totally unnecessary as the parents should certainly have handled it before then.
... not to have sex.
In general, I'm probably pretty much in agreement with you on this one.
I do feel that the federal government has a responsibility to make sure that states don't take away rights which are specifically guaranteed in the constitution. So, for example, I think (some) anti-discrimination laws are good and (sadly) necessary.
I probably wouldn't lump abortion in there as there will for the forseeable future always be states where it is legal.
In our nation right now, the she is all-powerful and the fetus has essentially no rights. I think this balance is very wrong.
I think this balance is right, and further, I don't see how it is possible to have it any other way.
In the broadest sense, how could you ever grant a right to something that has never asked for it?
No fetus has ever expressed any sort of desire, thought, sentience, or anything of the sort.
Given this, how could you decide what they want? How can you decide what is best for them?
I understand your argument, but my 2 major issues with it are:
1) It proposes giving weight to the thoughts and feelings of something that by definition doesn't have them.
2) Power will be removed from people over what goes on inside their own bodies, and it won't go to those who you propose need more as they are entirely unable to wield it. This power will go to somebody, and those people I don't trust at all (for any value of "those people").
Giving a state (as in US state, or as in Nation) that kind of power over the most intimate details of a person's life is totally inconsistent with the possibility of a free society.
I disagree. I think there are lots of options
All of which suffer from the problems above.
I think sex ed should start no sooner than 6th grade,
I'd say no later. I guess we hit a sweet spot on that one
and should be a mandatory part of a larger health curriculum
Great.
I'd also add a defense from mass media manipulation course as well.
I think it should be set down in print that the best way to avoid pregnancy and STD's is
It's the truth, ain't it?
I have a problem when it is pushed as the only way and disinformation is spread deliberately though.
As a matter of health, it's society's concern. As a matter of morality, that's up to the individual parent. So no teachers telling the kids how great it is either.
Also, when I was in high school I think a lot more people thought their friends were having sex -- that it was acceptable and desirable behavior -- than was actually the case,
Or maybe less thought so than was the case. As I think we agree on, it's largely the ignorance and disinformation that is the problem.
(Something inside me still says "if they're old enough to be having sex, they're old enough to be taking responsibility for themselves." But reality trumps my personal morality on this one.)
They totally should be. I think putting an emphasis on fixing the problem rather than punishing the victims ( whether the mother, the baby, or the fetus) would do more to help than laws that, in my mind, are inconceivably invasive.
IMHO, JP2 was wrong when he pushed so hard against birth control. One could reasonably argue that htis has resulted in genocide in Africa through the AIDS epidemic
So far so good. It is also arguable that it has caused continued poverty and even increased it.
The converse to those arguments are barely arguable at all though. There are very bizarre twists of reasoning that people often attempt to use, but the pro and con on those arguments are in no way on anything like an equal footing.
You were doing pretty well until you totally blew it here:
IMHO, JP2 was wrong when he pushed so hard against birth control. One could reasonably argue that htis has resulted in genocide in Africa through the AIDS epidemic
Of course he could have known and he did know.
His disgusting policies with respect to one of the most fundamental of all human rights, the right to control when where and with who you choose to reproduce were pushed in the face of tremendous opposition from people of morals due to the fact that any theoretical benefit was nothing compared to the very real and well know liabilities in such immoral and unhuman policies.
Did the decision seem right to him and other Catholic leaders at the time? Yes.
Certainly, but what you are leaving out here is that the purpose of this policy as well as the purpose of any other policy instituted by the Catholic Church is intended for the primary purpose of maintaining and increasing the power of the Catholic Church. I'm really sorry you've made it this far in life without realising that that is an absolute fact of power structures. They inevitably seek to promote their own power.
I'm certainly not singling the Catholic Church out on this one. It is an unavoidable fact of life though, so it would be better for everybody if you realised that, started looking at every situation with that fact in mind, and responding accordingly.
The alternative is you having "faith" that the pope really must have had the best interests of people in mind when he made decisions that had no other possible effects than those which everybody besides religious zealots predicted.
It was obvious what would happen with aids and poverty with the Catholic Church's inhuman policies. Were you able to step back and look rationally at the issue, it would be obvious to you as well and you wouldn't be attempting to apologize for the pope.
It's a basic rule of life. Watch the money, watch the power. There is your explanation. This holds in almost every single action taken by every single political or religious leader.
Was it right in hindsight? Probably not.
Oh where is there one single possible grain of doubt there?
Should people be able to have abortions?
I'd have to say absolutely positively with no doubt whatsoever. Turn it around. Say that you ban abortion. What you are doing by this is taking somebody who knows far more about their own abilities, personality and desires than you do. They know far more about their ability to raise a child than you do. They have a far better idea of what type of person they will be able to raise given their resources and prospects than you do.
You take this person, put a gun to their head, and tell them that they will be forced to spend 9 months "disabled" and then spend the next 18 years raising another person.
If this person fails to accomplish all of this to your satisfaction, they can then be sued or prosecuted over that. Even if they knew full well that they were in no way fit to be a parent and tried to take the moral course of not inflicting all of that suffering on society and upon their child.
Obviously abortion shouldn't be encouraged so what needs to be done is make sure that everybody is aware of how pregnancy occurs and what methods are available to prevent it (both basic simple biological facts).
But to pretend that a lump of cells should have *greater* rights than a living breathing person is utterly abhorent to the very concept of human rights.
The simple fact is that nobody can say absolutely what's best in all possible situations. The only possible way to be even remotely consistent is to leave the choice up to the one person who understands the issue and who will be overwhelmingly affected by it.
Should people be able to have abortions purely because of their lack of planning? I'm against it.
So where do you stand on the issue of sex education for schools? What about making condoms freely available to anybody of breeding age?
Typically (note, that's a word that includes the idea of "not always" i.e. possibly not you, so don't get your feathers all ruffled) people who take your position on the abotion issue take the diametrically opposed position on these. They feel none of that should be done. So they oppose abortions due to lack of planning while at the same time preventing people from being given the tools they need to actually do any planning. It's a really vicious and mean spirited game.
Should people be paid big bucks by research clinics to have abortions? Definitely not
I think this one gets a big Duh!
I had no luck either, unless you consider blinking keyboard lights "luck".
Gentoo worked fine after a fair bit of tweaking.
I don't quite go so far as to suggest that those that attempt to do so shouldnt be allowed to continue to exist.
I do in theory.
I have no idea how to code it into law in a way that would accomplish the goal (of preventing anybody from ever attempting anything so utterly fascist again) without totally trampling on real rights.
I mean seriously, they demonstrate complete and total disregard for the constitution, and the Liberal ideals that founded this country. The utter contempt they show for the *citizens* of this country to demand not only slave labor (we would be forced to work to pay their business expenses with no compensation) out of us, but then to get something that we already are paying for we have to pay again?
Why should we permit them to continue doing business given what they've demonstrated about themselves?
If they manage to make a bit more money, then they'll just pay enough next time to get it passed. They have shown us that that is their business model. Given that, why should they be allowed to do business?
Okay, fine. Innovation.
Not an issue. They are welcome to innovate. That's what the first part of my comment addressed.
Nobody is suggesting taking away their access to the data. They are suggesting taking away my access and still make me pay for it. Do you see the difference?
If they can do it, and be innovative enough that people are *willing* to pay for it, then great. They make some cash and people get a service they are happy with.
That is why innovation is totally irrelevant to this topic.