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Items like this only show that whoever's arguing has no fear about lowering the debate. If they expected to be taken seriously, they would make a press release explicitly stating the Bible's stance on homosexuality (IIRC it's against gay sex but not homosexuality itself). Then people would be free to choose whether or not to adhere to the Bible. Personally, I'm against fundamentalist adherence because I have to work on Sunday, which according to Leviticus I should be executed for.

Political discussion, at least in this forum, is an end unto itself. Ideally, by listening to other viewpoints and formulating my arguments for or against them, I both strengthen my political foundations and encourage others to do the same. Effectiveness is is open to debate.

I agree with Scheff on all fronts. The only thing I'll add is that the issue of corporate taxation is left unaddressed. Taxes on corporate earnings constitute a substantial chunk of the federal government's income, but under this plan they would only pay taxes when they buy office furniture (unless I'm missing something here). While this would lower their overhead, I would be very surprised if most corporations chose to reflect this by proportionately lowering the cost of their products. Corporations exist to make money, and will keep their products priced at a balance between profit from individual sales and total sale volume.

I hear Canada has a nicely built state system, so I'd give that a spin. Also, I still haven't seen Europe, and I'll have a nice nest egg built up by then. Might be fun to spend four years traveling. And then come back when Cheney is elected in '08 because I run out of money.

Bit of a loaded question isn't it? Sure, the money could have gone somewhere else, but then, so could the rest of the budget. It depends on your personal priorities. Besides, as has been pointed out, the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan were largely funded with deficit spending (flashback to the Reagan era), so this money would not have been spent under any other circumstances.

At 6/14/04 10:02 PM, MickFoliac wrote: That will just make you seem like a pussy

Yep, that's how they'll interpret your silence. The only recourse is to have an actual life off the BBS.

I collect survival gear. Never know what you're gonna need.

At 6/15/04 12:42 AM, SoulShadower wrote: Y-shaped...I wonder what condoms would look like if our penises were y-shaped..

That looks really...painful.

They certainly took the weasel way out - I wonder if this was because of the election year? Of course, the Supreme Court is never up for reelection, nor is it held accountable by the people as a body. However, a highly controversial decision might bring attention to their actions in 2000.

Speaking of which, I don't care what party is leading, if the popular vote of the state of Florida was a statistical tie, every single ballot needed to be recounted, regardless of any other considerations. The integrity of our democracy was at stake, and we ruled on the side of efficiency.

At 6/14/04 11:57 PM, Pee-WeeHerman wrote:

At 6/14/04 11:39 PM, Rudy1066 wrote: I see no problem wih legal aliens having the jobs that Americans won't touch;

But legal aliens are Americans. You defeat yourself.

"Legal aliens" aren't necessarily citizens. Often they immigrate under visas and stay (that's what my great-grandfather did). While they are under visas they are legal inhabitants of America but do not have the same rights American citizens do.

At 6/11/04 11:41 PM, SKUNKbrs wrote: I doubt any of us will go on to lead a revolution. The most that any of this will do is expose us to new viewpoints and ideologies.

The world is made up of individuals. For every informed, educated, intelligent person, there is another less gifted. It is every citizen's duty to seek the highest levels of enlightenment for the good of oneself, one's immediate community, one's nation, and humankind itself.

At least, that's what I think. It's how I justify my existence and hanging around in these dives;)

At 6/12/04 02:43 PM, Gooie wrote:

At 6/12/04 01:13 PM, mrpopenfresh wrote: Ah, irony at its finest.

meh, I've seen better

I've seen worse, too. Good catch.

Yes, that's the basic concept - or so it would seem on the surface. While Democrats claim to support the poor, the simple fact is that it doesn't pay well. Money is what drives campaigns today, and the poor don't contribute to campaign funds. Compare the political donations of unions (representing working class people) to those of corporations (representing generally wealthy shareholders) and you'll see that corporations out-donate at least 3 to 1. Dig into public debates and it's frightening how similar Democratic proposed solutions are to the Republican version.

As you say, you're not a very political person. That's fine. But realize that politics is a murky pool, with many levels that the vast majority of people (including me, of course), can't penetrate. It's not this simple.

At 6/8/04 03:03 PM, Gobo718 wrote: Not until the 3rd parties learn to organize, advertise, and fund-raise better and show themselves as a viable alternative. Won't happen anytime soon. Vote for one of the two candidates who are going to win anyway.

By this logic, the only way a party can become legit and a significant political presence is by advertising. A major plank of many third parties is that the system of advertising during political campaigns is itself corrupt in that it causes voters to judge based not on politics but on ephemeral issues, mudslinging being primary. To raise the money necessary to fund these PR campaigns, the two major parties become indebted to their campaign donors in a way that they are not to their constituency. If cash is more important to sway voters than the actual performance in office (who pays attention anyway?), then these politicians will become beholden to their suppliers, not to those they represent. It isn't an option for third party candidates to engage in this system because they claim to stand against it, and breaking that code robs them of any claim of integrity.

People don't vote for third parties because no one votes for third parties.

That's nice but we don't care. Bye!

At 6/12/04 09:31 AM, jonthomson wrote: People don't hate sprite movies. People hate shit sprite movies. Same as people hate shit stick movies, shit Matrix parodies, shit movies full stop. Very few people hate a whole genre of flash, and they're usually cretins.

*applause*

Naturally, it'll bother some and not others. As for me, my only problem is when poor grammar and spelling make a post harder to read and understand.

Congrats. Go you.

Tragically, it seems that for every intelligent, grammatically educated NGer who takes time to spellcheck and compose sentences, there are two or three speaking 1334 and fonix. It drives me nuts. The exception, for the most part, seems to be the Politics forum - though even there, the illiterate maintain a strong presence.

And, of course, few who need to read this thread actually will, and those will ignore it. But it made a few of us feel better.

I don't think I've paid more than $40 for shoes in my life...these people are nuts.

Nothing but respect for all the code that went into automating the portal...I mean it works sweet, nothing else to say.

At 6/6/04 07:09 PM, drDAK wrote: i just dont believe in abortion. It kills babies. They are babies without a chance.

What abortion really is:

A probe needle is stuck through the test subject's (Baby's) cranium and the brain is removed. Thus creating a dead, innocent unborn child, and destroying a life form.

Hmm, yes, let's portray the entire issue as revolving around the single most nauseating and disgusting aspect of it. Another example: argue that the death penalty must exist because of Hitler. Let's ignore the shades of gray, shall we?

The procedure you refer to, known as partial-birth abortion or late-term abortion, is not a common form of abortion. In fact, it is almost always used to protect the health of the mother when doctors realize that delivering the baby will threaten her health or life. Most abortions occur in the first trimester, with some in the second. At this point, the fetus is a clump of growing cells. Clumps of cells have the potential to become a human being, but are entirely dependent on the mother. They have no mental activity and no heartbeat.

Furthermore, if one ascribes that the unborn are people, one must also ascribe rights and priveleges to those people. For one thing, they deserve to be counted as children under federal tax guidelines. Is the federal government really going to extend tax breaks to every woman who is pregnant to any degree during the fiscal year?

At 6/6/04 05:48 PM, drDAK wrote: I do agree, i hate 2 see those soldiers being killed. But, once the job is done, we will ALL feel much more better about the situation.

Yes, once Iraq is an actual democracy under its own popular control, with its own police and military forces that do not engage in the cruel excesses of Saddam's regime or the fewer but still considerable excesses of the occupying forces, with an economy that is self-sufficient and can approach globalization on its own two feet, free of foreign contractors inflicting "development" against Iraqi will (which would you prefer for your country: cell phones or clean drinking water?), then the job will be done. We will all feel "much more better" about the situation.

But Bush has already promised to pull most US forces out of Iraq and transfer control to the national government by the end of this month. While the government now exists, it has little democratic legitimacy as the Iraqi people had no role in its creation. That will change at the next Iraqi election, if one occurs and it is not hideously corrupt. Many of the military officers of Saddam's regime are again employed by the new government, despite their past crimes of torture and rape. Bush's promise does not include the nonmilitary contractors serving under various US corporations and other entities, essentially acting as mercenaries whose legal status is not clear - whether they obey the laws of the US or Iraq or only the Geneva Convention or none, and what court will prosecute them if they break those laws.

In short, there are a lot of questions that must be answered before the job will be done, and until then we have to deal with the consequences of our hostile foreign invasion on trumped-up motives.

No one thinks that the world is worse off now that Saddam is removed from power. But that is a simplistic method to force the debate away from the real issues that need to be dealt with.

At 6/5/04 05:41 PM, CapitalistSocialist wrote:
He did do a lot to cool off the cold war which is probably his most lasting achievement

Um, after the infamous Evil Empire speech, where he accused all Communists in the world, especially the Soviet Union, of being evil incarnate? While he never attacked the USSR, he certainly continued the US tradition of hating Soviets for propagandistic reasons.

One theory is that Reagan was a man of little intelligence prone to making important decisions on a lark and holding to precious ideas against all evidence to the contrary and slowly sinking into senility in the waning years of his administration. The counterargument runs that the entire time he was appearing to be a dolt, he was doing so to deceive his enemies into underestimating him. Not unlike someone else. You make the call.

But I gotta respect a man who gets so much freakin' play on radio talk shows. His ideas have proven formative to the neocon movement.

Yet another serious issue reduced to a blurb that actually entertains some people. Unfortunately, it won't draw attention to abused children, it just lets people laugh at them. Sad, really.

Call me a heretic, but I preferred the EoE ending - it made a lot more sense and actually resolved more plot points that had been developed throughout the series. Ep 26 specifically closed the Human Instrumentality Project plotline without addressing anything else, which I found annoying.

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Urban Chaos. BAD game, but a black heroine.

I watched a PBS special on racial diversity in Hollywood a bit back. A (white) producer stated on the record that putting a black person in the lead role immediately means that the movie will make less money, so most lead roles are given to white actors. Interpret that as you will.

While the dearth of black leads doesn't necessarily mean the video game industry is racist, America does have a history of immigration and assimilation. It would be nice if public aspects of our culture (movies, TV, magazines, video games, etc.) reflected a heterogenous society. It's not the same as creating a "black" media culture with Essence, Ebony, and BET and separating that from the mainstream culture that reflects the white majority.

You have to define "freedom" first.

WWI was, for Europe, primarily caused by the invocation of alliance treaties designed to prevent war on a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) principle. Therefore, the war was fought in the name of protecting the people from warfare, even though it was the most devastating war fought on European soil to that point. That could be considered protecting all of every person's rights, i.e. freedoms.

WWII, as I recall, was primarily a defensive reaction to German aggression. After the terrifying destruction of WWI, many Europeans were willing to tolerate German military buildup with appeasement in order to avoid war. When Germany began invading other nations en masse, the reaction occurred to protect the freedoms of the natives of those lands. As information about Nazi death camps came to light in the waning days of the war, they, too were used to justify combat. Both of these are protections of freedom.

From the American point of view, so was Korea and Vietnam and every overthrow of a foreign government to "prevent the spread of Communism" during the latter half of the 20th century. Since capitalism represented "freedom," any action taken to foment capitalist democracies, create US-friendly governements, and stop the spread of communism was necessarily in defense of the world's freedom. After all, if the commies prevailed, they would prevent anyone anywhere from exercising civil rights. Or so we believed (seems psychotic now, doesn't it?).

Hammer that point home. All wars defend someone's freedom, even if that someone is the dictator in power.

Eventually you'd still get the same effect. Factions would develop within the monolith party that would seek different solutions to the same problems. Charismatic individuals would emerge to lead these factions, and would gather power by appealing to the citizenry as a whole. As it is inappropriate to always apply the same set of principles to every situation (think about how complicated the law code is), ideological shift and division would occur over time, no matter what party line the monolith followed.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under Heaven.