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At 2/23/05 09:13 PM, Jimsween wrote:

But you know, nobody can really give you a good reason why weed should be illegal, at least I haven't seen a person be able to. It's like they know they aren't right, but don't care.

I think the thing with those people is that they classify weed as a harmful and addictive drug whose legalization would dramatically increase use and damage the delicate fabric of our society.

Also, a number of people said that having marijuana provided by the government would not work very well because alot of people would grow their own pot. You, folks, are overlooking one aspect and argument for legalizing pot; with the government providing a cheap and standardized product, there would be little incentive to buy pot from a home growing operation. This would be because both of the increased availability of pot and because the risks you take when buying from an unknown source - such as contamination of the weed - would not be an issue.

i'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that all of the anti masturbation people posting in the last two pages are either retarted or much more likely, joking. all or most of the people that are arguing with them are not all that bright.
am i right?

there's also the anti-french one, type in "french military victories" and click i'm feeling lucky, it's pretty funny.

I think you guys should clarify what you are talking about.
is it Communism: Totalitarian government that is based on public ownership (not so much equal share) of the means of production.
or is it Socialism: An economic system that is based on public ownership and coperation between workers. You could also go further and include Stalinism in your definition. Stalinism is what the critics of Communism are using as a case against (it's definition is really the one for communism above) It is totalitarian and very restrictive in term of people's lives. True communism, was never achieved. It used socialist principles as a way of completely getting rid of government.

The idea was to for a government where diplomatically elected representatives would debate and decisions were made by consensus. This, in my opinon is a far better system than the one we have today. What was supposed to happen afterwards was this: Once the people see the merits of cooperating, the need for a government would get smaller and smller untill it would no longer be needed.

What happned whas that the people in charge at the time decided that they wanted more power/controll. they introduced more and more restrictions untill you end up with Stalinism. Had this not been allowed to happen, perhaps we would be writind this in russian.

Should there be a thread of definitions or something on NG?

In my previous post, i was a littl inaccurate. I spoke with my social teacher yesterday about the whole communist thing and he clarified some things for me. First of all, what the goal of communism was was to create a "worker's dictatorship". theoretically, what would happen, is at first, there would be an elected government that would oversee the operaion of the country. Once the people realized the benifits of working that the need for government would go away. While, in my opinion, there would still have to be some leadership to direct things such as infrastructure, the theoretical principles behind the soviet union were reasonably sound. At first, the system worked wonderfully there was a comitee that made decision by a consensus between elected officials providing as close to a pure democracy as that country could have. However, the people in power at the time decided that they wanted to have controll. They put more and more ristrictions in place to maintain controll and in the end, they ended up with a totalitarian dictatorship.
I was recommended a reading on that subject by my teacher. it's called "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924" by Orlando Figes. It supposedly deals with this matter in much more detail than i would ever include in this post.

As for religion...
I am personally agnostic but with leanings twoards atheism (if you need me classifed). I don't believe in Jebus or God. I can't disprove them but i preffer to ignore them. The three arguments that i hear against atheism and my answers to them are as follows:
1. If you don't believe in God and he exists, you will go to hell. If you do believe in God, and he does not, you loose nothing. While this is a logical argument, I disagree. In my opinon, people feel the need to believe in heaven and hell because they are afraid of death. They need to know what happens after you die and since religion gives this easy answer, they turn to it. Perhaps this is not the best way to go about death. Perhaps, we should strive to accept it and understand it. Religion feeds on people's fear of the unknown by providing quick answers to difficult questons. I believe that we should focus instead on shedding our fear of it and understanding the world around us.
2. Religion provides a system of bleiefs and values on which our society is based - and would cllapse without. This I find quite preposterous. Some of the values discribed in the Bible are not only archaic but also illegal. Some of the things that are "good wholesome christian values" are infact good things to abide by but there does not need to be a rule book that tells us how to live our lives. Most of the things that good christians value are ignored by alot of people anyway.
3. Religion is about having a relationship with god, the benifits woule me immeasurable. This is a tough one to refute but i look at it this way:
- I have no gains or losses in real life by having a relationship with god. He will not raise my marks if i'm an idiot. He does not solve my emotional problems. When i pray, i talk to myself and speculate on whether he heard me.
- If i have no gain or loss by having a relatonship with god then there's no way he can play a role in my life
- If he can not play a role in my life why in the hell would I have a relationship with him?
furthermore: what's the deal with church?

By the way, i did not mean "forum goons" as derogatory.
furhtermore, since religion is " a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith ", atheism is a religion.

I think that's enough for today, do your eyes hurt after reading this?
Holy crap, i ran out of background, i'm typing on white now (you probably didn't need to know that)

At 12/8/03 03:01 AM, Lyddiechu wrote: But anyway, sorry kid, if you read any Marx, he will tell you that its impossible to reach Communism without first going through the stage of socialism, and so far everyone has failed miserably at Marxian socialism.

I'm not 100% sure, but I am 95% sure that you, like many others have socialism and communism confused.
Communism: a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production
Socialism: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
Communism is a branch off of Socialism. In my oponion, alot you forum goons have smushed the two terms together. This is not so. Socialism does not mean evil dictatorship and Communism does not mean worker's utopia danmit!
What i believe Marx said - and what the soviet union NEVER FINISHED - was that there must first be a government like we see exibited in communist Russia and once things have "settled down", that government would essentially dissolve, creating a republic of the workers. The problem with that ended up when the government, given alot of power (it was totalitarian after all), would have to voulentarily give it up.

Let's face reality for a moment, shall we? People are going to believe in money,

greedy bastards

and people are going to believe in G-d no matter what you do or say. Humans are animals

yes, let's not try to improve. just accept it and give up. Good plan.

for many of us, including myself, there are still many things that cannot be explained yet exist, such as, in my humble opinion, great beauty and the feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music that is so wonderful it makes your heart break. There is definitally something divine in that, I think everyone, even the most hardened atheist (which i once was and still in many ways am) can admit that.

It would be nice to look at any feeling you have as the divine but in my humble opinion, that's kinda... how should i say it... not good.
We should try observe the world in terms of what it is, not how it makes us feel. Sure, emotion is great and all but it's not divine. It's pretty much just chemicals going through your brain and body or something like that. Divine is something more like the very existance of the universe. I'm glad music moves you, i just don't think that it's undeniable proof of the divine.
That's pretty much the end of my little rant

This is kinda weird. They slave over these miniscule little details but as I had read earlier today (there was a link in a post on this site, i forget which one, but it was to the bowling for columbine site), that said while things like nail clippers were banned from airlpanes (the terrorists could clip the pilot's nails which we all know is their only weakness) lighters and matches which can and later were used to try and start a fire or ignite an explosive were not banned because of tobbaco lobbyists pleas to government.

aren't we basically discussing 'who is better: republicans or democrats?' only using the two latest presidents as symols for them?
If that's the case, then waht's the point? There are elections for a reason.

At 11/3/03 08:56 PM, Dig_the_Man wrote: In the mean time though, a cap on human population would be a good idea. Stop people from having kids and lower the population slowly and that will help the Earth out a lot! Who knows if it is moral though!

Woo!!! Go communist China! That's the way to go! (not)

At 11/3/03 08:56 PM, Dig_the_Man wrote: In the mean time though, a cap on human population would be a good idea. Stop people from having kids and lower the population slowly and that will help the Earth out a lot! Who knows if it is moral though!

Woo! go comunist China! That's the way to go!

At 11/3/03 06:53 AM, hugh_jarse wrote: We've robbed her of forestation, sustainable soil, ground water, resources, fauna, ozone etc. etc.

you mean cut down trees and destroyed perfectly good soild that would be very usefull for farming? yes we did.

We've polluted the air, soil and the water. We've polluted each other.

Yes, not us specifically - from what i understand - but the approach we have held for manufacturing for far too long. only in the lase few years have we even remotely become concerned with the effects our businesses have had on nature. It may not be all that cheap but yes, we do have to make sacrifices to our "profits" in order to survive.

Recycling has been established far too long from any position to do any good.

Sorry, but that makes no sense.

:We've exhausted our food supplies and oxygen.

Not quite yet. If we had, we would be dead by now. there's just massive pollution in some areas and an extremely unbalanced distribution of the world's food resources. In spite of what you may think, we - as a planet - currently grow enough food to feed the population of the earth. It's just that countries that grow the food do not distribute it among every peson in the planet (uneconomical). Also, if underdeveloped countries actually had the capital to develop the farmland that they have and implement modern farming techniques (so as not to loose any farmable land to desertification) the wourld could comfortably house a much larger number of people (20 billion i think).

:Forgotten about the populations living outside of our lands, that suffer daily.

on a global scale you can't do that, outside our lands means outside the earth on that scale ( i assume that's the scale youre talking about )

Unless something happens, now.

I dont think we'll live out the end of this century..

i think this century we will be fine, it's century after next that we would not survive (at this rate)

At 11/2/03 01:41 PM, mrpopenfresh wrote: If the US ever decides to invade a random country ... ooh boy would they be in shit! I would predict total boycotting of american products from most countrys, total alienation of the US from all countrys, ... Something like that wpuld never be able to go through without making the US totally hated by the rest of the world.

I don't know, guy, I would think that would happen in an ideal situation but I think that the US has enough weight (mostly econoimc) to influence enough key countries to just ignore whatever would be going on (If anyone actually knows for sure it would be nice if they spoke). Kinda scary to think that a country - no, a small group of people at the head of a country - could just do something without really following anyone else's opinion on the matter. It would be like that one Dilber comic:
Boss: "Your phone and computer will be disconected for weeks. Your files will be boxed and lost.
Dilbert: "Good lord, youve abandoned all pretense of being on our side!!!"
Boss: "Looser"
I mean in a pretense sort of way.

At 10/29/03 05:05 PM, General_Patton wrote: Actually, global warming is sort of on shakey ground. What Bush probably means is taht he does not believe taht the earth is going to change tmperature up about 15 degrees and everything is going to die. There are theories about ice ages, greenhouse effects, or that thios is meremly natural (volcanos, cows, etc... all destroy the ozone along with human technology). That statement is taken out of context.

Yeah, from what i understand, when mount helena erupted, it released more greenhouse gasses than the whole human race so far, combined (feel free to contradict me)
What i think we, and bush, should be more worried about is the pollutants that are in our environment.

What if the US just arbitrarily invaded a generic country, no warning to anyone, just went in and took over? What could anyone else do?
I'm not really talking abut Iraq. I'm talking about invasion without even any pretense of having any specific reason for it. Also, what would happen if the US invaded a country for the express purpose of taking it's land or something like that? (eg. invade Mexico to incorporate Mexico's economy in to theirs)
I'm not flaming the US here, it's just a hypothetical question.

I cant think of any new ones bot we canadians showed them a thing our two back in 1812. maybe we should list the countries that the US has been invaded by.

I think that both for canada and the us there should be no more that two consecutive terms for President/PM but the president should be allowed to run after a 1 term "breather". this way, you dont get rid of the good presidents but you also get to see whether anyone can actually do the job better.
B.T.W
CCCP (pronounced in russian as SSSR) is russian for USSR

At 9/13/03 11:07 PM, Andy_Parker wrote: You are a stupid commy who doesn't listen, he just speaks. Ill say this again, Communism failed, we all know that, and a movie supporting communism failed, therefore communism failed again.
To a simple minded individual such as yourself, you may not realise that, although i do hate communism with a passion, this thread was not to be taken as seriously as you try-hard-communists are doing.

Holy hell, you my friend are insane - if saying that makes me a commie then youre an idiot.
I'm sure that if somebody made a movie about the virtues of capitalism on newgrounds it would also get blammed just as fast as the commie one. The truth is, noone cares about who likes which political and economic systems. And trust me on this one, Capitalism, especially in it's pure form, has a LOT of shortcomings. Moderation is the key.

At 9/14/03 12:23 AM, FUNKbrs wrote: I'd have to agree with all the other intelligent people in this thread. Cloning can ONLY MAKE GENETIC COPIES. Clones won't share memories, all they will share is DNA. Its like having twins, only not at the same time. Besides, how is it sacriligious? Clones require use of donor DNA. Therefore, its not really "creation of life".

I think the curch view on this is that to be a person you have to have a soul. They believe who you are is stored in your soul and has nothing to do with what youre made of. If we make a duplicate of another person (which we can't), you have to duplicate their soul as well. If we try to "grow" a person, regardless of wether we succeed or not, we are trying to make a soul and that would be "playing god".
At least that's my uninformed opinion (I'm an atheist so I don't really research their views all that much).

Yay! I am the man!

Haha! it's so funny, a lot of people told the US not to go in, that they don't support the war but they went in anyway. Now, those troops that, according to Bush, were never going to be used in nation buuilding are being used just for that purpose and failing at it.
It really makes you wonder just how much thought Bush put in to this whole thing. Was to plan to go in, bomb some buildings, fight the Iraqi army, kill Saddam, name some people for the new government and leave in about two weeks? Why was he pushing so hard to go in and 'rescue' the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam when he clearly had no way of doing that?
I personally saw this coming even before the war started and while i was upset at first that the leader of the most powerfull country in the world might be dumb enough to attempt something like that but since i have gotten over it, i'm just going to sit back and laugh.

I'm not personally left or right wing. I just like to use common sense and speak out against the things that are obscenely wrong.

This is kind of like that whole war on terorrism thing. file sharing has, i think, reached the point where it's more of an idea than a set of programs and as experience seems to show, you cant shoot, or sue, an idea... well, maybe you can sue it in the US.

First of all, i believe that the kind of people that are true anarchists are very few and far in between. A vast majority of people that scrawl what could be termed the anarchy "logo" are supportive of a bastardized version of anarchy where chaos rules and only the strongest survive (Government evolved to avoid this).
Second of all, i'd like to say that you can't just join a 'school of thought'. You examine all the choices in detail and then decide which best suits you and live by it.
Then again, it's just the opinion of someone who may or may even know what they are talking about.

If there were no weapons at all, people would fight with fists. that is, untill someone got a stick. then they would use sticks. then someone would make a knife and that would quickly take over. this would be followed by a bigger knife (a sword) and maybe some armor and then maybe we would get slings, bows, and crossbows. guns would follow shortly after and soon we would have bigger and bigger guns and cannons and flying guns (planes) and floating guns (boats) and maybe guns that use explosives and plutonium and whatever else we can find (maybe lazers?). This is ofcourse all moot since during the diarmament process, someone would hide a gun and after all the weapons are gone he would pull it out and say "haha! i have the last gun! i'm king of the world!" because he ould have taken over the world with that gun.
regardless, just because you take guns away, does not mean that people will stop killing eachother. Don't get me wrong, i'm all for gun controll but we don't kill people because we have guns. we have guns to kill people with less effort than if we killed somebody by punching them.

At 9/11/03 12:57 PM, Pueidist wrote: That's exactly what the Bush Administartion as well as like 50% of America that are idiots. Why don't people realize that you cannot fight a war against an abstract idea?

haha! it's funny cause it's true

At 9/6/03 09:05 AM, -Sphere- wrote:

At 9/4/03 04:45 PM, Sekky wrote:

religious, becasue they think they have the real gods and that everybody else are heretics

give me an example of a religion that advocates war as part of it's teachings? it's sacriligious to have war and yet we had the crusades, suicide bombings, and whathaveyou.

as a sidenote, the only thing i hate more than religious wars is missionaries giving bibles to starving africans.

Wouldn't it be none of those? The only reason, in my opinion that countries ever go to war is because whever is in power wants to. everything else is just justification that is used to get public support. We fight because we are told to by god, or we fight because we are the best country and noone should stand in our way, of we fight because we have the biggest army and so on and so on. whoever has the power, can steer the country in whatever way he wants. you could do great deeds with your power or be like george bush and just bomb the crap after everyone. first it was afganistan, then it was iraq, next we go to africa or maybe korea, then, (if there's time) we nuke france.

At 9/11/03 11:00 PM, adrshepard wrote: I think most people would disagree with you that he is an idiot. He managed to convince enough people that he was the right choice for office three years ago, which is probably more than you can say about anything. I won't even go into his presidency. Just look at this fact for a start.

He managed to convince less that 50% of the people that he's the right choice. Whatever happened to 50%+1?

At 8/25/03 10:08 PM, Bowserkvn wrote: cmon if you hate america so much than leave, where else are you going to go that is as rich a country as this?

Um... how about canada?

canada? -gimme a break

Yes, it's only nicer, cleaner, with less crime, that health care the americans keep going north of the border for, the fact that were not willing to suspend human rights just to appease the paranoid (post sept. 11th stuff). That and the fact that not every other person is most likely carrying a concealed weapon. naww, who would want to go to canada? i heard it's smelly up there.

overall america is cool

I hate you

People sue people for really stupid things. There was a guy that broke into a family's house while they were on vacation but locked himself in their garage by accident. he had to eat cat food for three days to survive. he sued them and won.