BTGBullseye

My computer glitches when seeding.

Until you're old enough to drink, I have no advice on stress. Once you're old enough, my advice is don't drink too much.

I have no idea.

It was just that all 4 were available on Netflix, and I was curious. (I've always liked the original, and the idea that in order to gain the right to vote you have to have some military service)

Yeah yeah yeah, keep attacking anti war movements. It's so mature.

I'm not attacking an anti-war movement, I'm defending people being attacked by people who are 'anti-war'.

First of all, religious tests for office are unconstitutional http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Religious_Test_Clause and yes this applies to the states as well.

Second, would you also be okay if a majority decided to put into legislation that white people or christians are unfit for office?

I'm fairly sure these "tyranny of the majority" scenarios are why things like the bill of rights exist.

Except that the 7 state's constitutions state only that someone must believe in God, not that they must be a specific religion. The problem that always ends up happening (and is right now) is that when atheists are in charge they actively try to remove religion of any other kind from any form of visibility. Christians tend to discourage, yes, but they don't fight tooth and nail to kill every other religion.

Also, as it is in state legislature and state constitutions, it technically is overridden by the US Constitution. Unless they secede from the Union, those 'laws' can never be applied.

Oh yes, the United States has a very rich history of discriminating and oppressing almost every single non-wasp group.

However you do realize homosexuality used to be a crime right? And many laws criminalizing homosexual behavior did not start being repealed until the latter half of the 20th century, or even the early 21st with Lawrence V Texas. It is more than reasonable to offer this group of citizens some more explicit protection given the history.

Your opinion is to give specific wording over more useful generalized wording? Seems perfectly illogical to me.

So would you be in favor of scrapping the language that gives explicit protection to people on the basis of race, gender and religion? I mean why have that if it just leaves the door open for other forms of discrimination?

I would if they could find a way to do so, but since this country is on the path to following the letter of the law to the exclusion of the spirit of the law... As far as I can tell you're one of those type of people that would rather have specific words to follow than an idea.

A common narrative in conservative circles, often used to justify actions and policies that give the outward appearance of government privileging one faith over other faiths or non-faith. You'll only see this argument made by people who would be in the comfortable dominant majority faith. It stems from a desire for religious privilege and dominance, not religious liberty.

So who is this 'comfortably dominant majority faith'? You seem to be attributing a lot towards it. Don't say 'Christians', as that covers well over 100 different denominations in this country. (and most of them are non-hostile to opposing religions)

Thankfully many constitutional scholars and supreme court justices have interpreted the first amendment differently than you have.

And most of those have read nothing of what the founding fathers wrote afterwards that explained the meaning of the words. The few who have, ignored it.

Only a government that is neutral regarding religion can safeguard the religious freedoms of all its citizens, and please don't give me that bull about secularism being a religion too. Do you really want the government endorsing one religion over others? I'm sure you don't mind if it's your religion, but what if it's not?

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" - Says it all. Making it illegal to say a prayer out loud in a public location would be a violation of this, as would making a prayer mandatory. It does not prohibit religious influences from being displayed on public grounds. A display of the ten commandments doesn't force people to follow them, as is evidenced by Christians that have sex outside of marriage, or that say "God damn", etc.

Sure you can vote for religious reasons, go into government for religious reasons, be motivated by religion while in office etc.

But I'm with supreme court justice Harry Blackmun on this

When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some

What you and he fail to recognize is that the bible quite thoroughly says that God loves everyone equally... It does say that in the old testament that the Jews are his people of choice, but because they were just as, if not worse than the rest of the people of the world, he stopped giving his favor to them. (this is going off all Christian bibles here)

This is where people say the country was built on Christian beliefs, because as far as I can tell, each and every one of the bill of rights was lifted from somewhere in the Christian bible, and belief system. (I can go into detail on most of them, but that is really something for another thread)

Regardless, christianity is well represented (some stats show overrepresented) in U.S. government on both the federal and state level with a vast majority of representatives and officials being christian. It's part of the reason of why howls of christian persecution are mostly met with exasperated sighs and face palms by non-christians.

Now are they actually Christian, or do they just say they are to get the Christian votes? That's the problem. Saying that 'the Christian majority' is being represented is very difficult to say accurately, with the majority of politicians saying many things that they will fight for once in office, which they then fight for the exact opposite of once in. (evidence: Obama. Just do a search for "Obama campaign lies")

If you're talking about same-sex unions, according to wikipedia hawaii was the first to legally recognize those in 1997, wich is not THAT long ago. To add to that DOMA created an unequal situation for a long time until it was struck down.

It's actually a very simple freedom issue. Do you believe marriage should only be between a man and a woman? Then it is within your right to marry someone of the opposite sex and choose never to marry someone of the same sex.

That's the end of it, that's where your influence ends you made a choice and it concerns only you. However you don't get to take away the choice of others to go into a same sex marriage with all the same benefits and social status. Things change, societies change, definitions change that's how its always goes. Let other people be free to make choices you yourself would not.

You're looking at it from a completely different way than I'm trying to show you. Every single benefit of marriage, (tax status, next of kin, power of attorney, etc.) excluding the official title of "married" is given to anyone who wants it, and it has been that way since before the 60's. (my parents remember people getting group 'marriages' this way in the early 60's)

They are perfectly free to do that, but please don't change the meaning of words that haven't changed ever in recorded history, simply to try and make homosexual unions 'acceptable'.

Same goes the U.S. political spectrum, someone who is considered "centrist" in the U.S. may be considered right or at least right of center in Europe.

In order to be considered a middle of the road person in the US, you have to be leaning towards neo-liberalism... I do agree with that assessment. Which is unfortunate, since that isn't actually middle of the road.

The political compass does provide a nice standardized spectrum to put the U.S. in a wider perspective though.

That it does.

Unions have done a lot of good in the past, it's when they become too powerful they become counter productive, it's about balancing power. If employers have too much power over their labor force the result is lower wages and worse working conditions. Workers are also consumers, and if they don't have the means to consume plenty of goods and services, it hurts the economy.

If unions have too much power and ask for too much employers will simply pack up shop and go elsewhere, also bad.

It's about balance of power.

My family has direct experience with forced unions... They forced my uncle to quit a good paying job with great benefits for a crappy (literally, dealing with pigs) job with no benefits, just because he didn't have enough saved to live off of for the duration of the forced strike. (all over a $0.25 raise that he didn't care about)

A forced union is bad in general.

I don't think the problem lies with taxes themselves, without taxes you can't really have a state and without a state you can't really have a well functioning market. I don't see companies rushing to set up shop in Somalia for instance. The problem lies with the ease capital can flow across the globe. Political power ends at the border, financial power does not. The financial powers are playing a 21st century game against political nation-state powers playing by a 19th century rule book. Which leads to tax competition.

I suppose your solution is to aggressively slash taxes all across the globe until states can do little else but run a police force and a military, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves hoping charity will be there to catch them should they slip up.

Myself I'd rather see the nations of the world work something out together to make it harder for them to be played out against each other by the ultra rich elite.

I'm not saying completely remove all taxes, but 50% is considered very high by anyone that has done research on taxes. The sweet spot is somewhere between 30% and 40%. (though I personally would like to see it down nearer the 15% mark)

Again it's so simple, against birth control? Don't use it. Don't impose that choice on other people. There are already plenty of religious exemptions for religious organizations and businesses. If you're the only pharmacy around for miles, don't use your position to make others involuntarily subject to your own personal religious prohibitions. So yeah I would support legislation to force them to have stuff like that on the shelves in certain situations. If they're not being forced to use it, their rights are not being violated. they're only prohibited from effectively imposing their own religious values on everyone else.

This is moot of course if there is a store/pharmacy/hospital nearby that isn't under such religious prohibitions.

So if nobody else in the area carries birth control, you have to violate your religious principles, rearrange your store to carry a new product, (limiting space available for other products) and invest money into a product that may or may not sell? Not only is it unconstitutional, it's forcing bad business practices.

If people are so concerned about spending, I don't see why a Republican would have their preference though. Republicans spend money, just on different things.

The way I see it, Americans simply go back and forth between the two. If one party isn't producing an economic boom lets try the other one, if that one doesn't manage, back to the other one. And so it goes.

It's unfortunate that no matter which you vote for, you get the same thing. It's been that way since the 90's.

These are getting long...so very long.

Very true.

I'll let you have the last word, I'm calling it quits for now

So am I, as this really isn't the thread we should be having constitutional debates in.

Sleepy.

As BTG failed

It was a browser fail... It didn't have another page when I responded.

I'm going to ask his question:

 

Sun tea or Arizona Iced Tea?

I get to answer my own question!!!

Sun tea.

And I'll ask it again, because WTFN.

Sun tea or Arizona Iced Tea?

Computer fans, the sound of the keys on my keyboard being depressed and released rapidly, and my stomach complaining that I had the wrong combination of ingredients for dinner.

Sleeping upright in my chair while typing. Heading to bed soon.

It's really just assholes that want to find something that they can legally use as a basis for discrimination. (and it happens on every side) All in all, it sucks for those of use that aren't looking to have hostilities.

I used to have a mower from the early 70's... Power drive, 5HP, pull string start... Custom blades... I could eat trees up to ¾ inch with that thing.

I made $45/hr in the summer mowing lawns in the neighborhood. (the greenest part of Sioux Falls, SD residential area) I averaged $200/week during the summer, and I was only 9 years old. (I even paid rent to my parents at that point)

Drank 4 cocktails last night. Didn't get drunk. Had one called 'Zombie Nation', which you're only allowed 2 of. Maybe it's the second one that wrecks you.

No, it's the third, they just know you're going to sneak one when you're not looking.

Well if we need to find people to fight... There's a thread that had some people that would probably be good at it, many of whom were attacked for their opinion about war. (hint hint)

I wonder why people complain about not getting enough people to fight the bad guys after attacking people for not being pacifists.[/sarcasm]

I don't mind. After all, someone will read this.

Yeah, well... It won't be me! I didn't read it! You can't prove I did!

Regarding guns, a lot of schools do really have absurd "zero-tolerance" policies enforced by administrators who are clearly completely insane. Here is a story about a boy being suspended for pointing his fingers like a gun.

Here is a story of a boy being suspended for having an imaginary bow and arrow.

And here is a story about a boy being suspended after threatening a classmate to unleash the power of the one ring.

There are so many stories like this, I'm actually keeping a file on them. It's insane, I have no other word for it. Insane.

It's not part of an anti-gun agenda, it's part of an extremely weird and insane anti-child agenda.

I remember some of those as well, now that you mention them. I agree with your assesment of those instances.

many schools appear to be run by complete idiots.

I can definitely support that sentiment.

Several states still have laws on the books barring the non-religious from holding public office http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_atheists#United_States though of course if push came to shove, these would be unenforceable.

If the majority decided that they wanted everyone in office to be a person of faith, then that's the right of the people. It's no different than putting a minimum age limit on being a candidate for the presidency. (that age limit is 35 years old BTW)

While I'll take your word for it that there hasn't been any legislation making it a crime to hire lgbt people or non-theists for that matter, for a long time it was not prohibited to discriminate against them either.

That's equivalent to saying that for a time there was nothing prohibiting discrimination against blue people with a limp. Anti-discrimination came about all around the same time, and almost everyone that wasn't a (non-Irish) white male of at least 35 years of age was discriminated against in some form. (and in reality, they still discriminate, except now they just find legal fake reasons to discriminate, like 'overqualified')

Though people enjoy explicit protection on the basis of their religion, race and gender, sexual orientation is often not included in non discrimination laws. This is not to say that in those states it's easy for an employer to fire someone who is gay, not at all. But making the protection as explicit as race, religion and gender is proving difficult in some areas.

Naturally... Specifying only certain areas of discrimination leaves the door open for huge discrimination of any and everyone else, "because the law says it's only those groups we can't discriminate against".

Other examples of christian privilege has been the routine use of government property to display christian symbols, messages etc. Often at the local level.

What most people seem to not get is that there is no such thing as "separation of church and state" in the constitution... What it says in the first amendment is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Nowhere in that does it say anything about religious symbols on public property. There are an awful lot of people that don't really know what the words say, much less mean.

The meaning of the part about religion was to prevent the government from interfering with religions like Britain did. The Church of England was appropriated so that the King had complete and total authority over the religion, even to the point of outlawing other religions as blasphemy. The founding fathers didn't want that to happen, so they put that wording in. It wasn't an accident that they didn't say that religion wasn't allowed to interfere with the government.

The prohibition of same sex marriage is another example where a christian majority believes it has the right to decide for others who they can and can't marry. It's an arbitrary prohibition based soley on religious dogma. Giving people the choice to marry someone of the same gender has zero effect on anyone but the individuals choosing to marry. Yet the rhetoric coming out of the christian right has been one of terrible persecution and oppression because some people now have a choice they didn't have before.

A lot of people take sides without realizing what exactly they are or aren't fighting for. Homosexuals have had the ability to have every single benefit of marriage, except for the title, for a very long time. Marriage (until recently in some states) was always defined as 1 man, 1 woman. (other than polygamy, [1 man, multiple women] which was outlawed in the USA a very long time ago as well) The entire fight was over changing the definition of a word that has not had it's meaning changed in thousands of years. (always been between heterosexual men and women)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage#History_of_marriage

Why they felt the need to change the meaning of a word? I'd say that P.C. movement you're against so much had quite some influence.

Let's not get into a debate over media echo chambers. That could go on for a while.

And we have a thread for that in another forum.

I know, in Europe the term "liberal" is still closer to what it used to mean.

It is indeed, but even so, it's still being perverted from what its real meaning is.

Personally I feel the U.S. and the west in general are in a conservative wave right now, you linked the political compass before so I'll link it as well here. http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012 you'll see both Obama and Romney on the right-authoritarian end.

The right is the neo-liberal side... A.K.A. the US version of liberal. (the left and right are switched in the US as well as the terms describing them) http://www.politicalcompass.org/images/axeswithnames.gif

Now of course they differed in some social issues but even when it comes to stuff like gay marriage, Obama only "evolved" on the issue once polls showed it would be politically safe or advantageous to do so.

Here is Europe btw: http://www.politicalcompass.org/euchart you'll see them all comfortably nestled in the right authoritarian end.

In other words, governments are pretty much the same everywhere... Authoritarian shitholes that want to control your life.

Now maybe the people who run this website are raging lefty socialists, but I've seen little evidence.

They may or may not be... All evidence points to them using no bias when making the compass though.

On a few social issues the left is gaining ground, granted.

Which left are you speaking of now? The US version, or the rest-of-the-world version?

On the other hand, unions are in decline, income inequality greatly on the rise, continued deregulation of industries and regulatory capture have met with little real voter opposition, even after major calamities. Firm opposition to any and all tax increases with the rise of the Tea Party.

I would certainly hope unions would be in decline. 90% of them do nothing at all beneficial for their members, and just sit there and forcibly take dues out of employee's paychecks. (I see it as synonymous to the mafia's 'protection' money shakedowns) Taxes have pretty well been blamed for declining economies across the globe for decades, and there is proof to back that up. (the businesses and rich move out of countries that tax them, leaving nothing but the impoverished and broken economies)

And let's not forget about the rise of the religious right, now powerful enough to make birth control once again a contested issue

So you think that there should be legal regulations that say that privately owned Christian businesses, and Christian hospitals should have to violate their beliefs, just because someone doesn't want to go to a different location, or a store to get their damn birth control? That is quite obviously a violation of the first amendment. (and the supreme court agrees)

The only democrats getting into the white house have to be centrists

Forgotten the political compass already I see... They're all in the center of the authoritarian neo-liberal quadrant, if that's what you mean.

Now I know some on the right frequently call Obama a radical ultra-left socialist and the second coming of Joseph Stalin, meanwhile the real socialists in Europe are laughing their assess off and are pretty sure Obama's not one of them.

There are idiots all along the spectrum.

I'm also fairly certain that in 2016 America will elect another Republican president.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0731/America-s-big-shift-right

Most likely... There is a large percentage of people in this country that are just trying to get away from the guy that gave away a trillion dollars to companies, just so they could go bankrupt anyways, and who happened to be the same guy that put a 4 trillion dollar 'free' healthcare bill through in record time, that actually fines people through taxes far more than having health insurance ever would. (I could get into more detail, but that's something for another thread)

I can't comment on this.

Most can't... It goes against what the media and all the US liberals are saying in the strongest possible way. (again, something really for another topic)

Star Trek Online.

Complete.

Cool Ranch, no question. Best chip on the planet.

Sun tea or Arizona Iced Tea?

"Happy. Sad. Dismayed. Huffy. Yearning, Jubilant. Distraught. Seductive. Petulant. Blissful. Frustrated. Raving. Sullen. Elated. Demure. Fretful. Delirious. Naughty. Whimsical. Sassy. Hypercritical. Serene. Blasé. Haughty. Spunky. Ashamed. Brooding. Intoxicated. Tingly. Seething. Goofy. Sulky. Contented. Frolicsome. Sarcastic. Abashed. Woeful. Giddy. Contrary. Grumpish. Overjoyed. Mopy. Prissy. Bitter. Prickly. Flippant. Smug. Amiable. Infuriated. Morose. Perky. Testy. Lackadaisical. Touchy. Cranky. Itchy. Lovelorn. Frisky. Perturbed. Listless. Resentful. Lonesome. Glum. Disturbed. Pleased. Peevish. Cocky. Unhinged. Mirthless. Jaded. Enraptured. Doleful. Inscrutable. Lustful. Jolly. Disgruntled. Surprised. Surprised. Surprised. Surprised."

(yes, I looked at each and every frame)

Starship Troopers - 8/10 - A classic. B+ or A- movie that gained a cult following.

Starship Troopers 2 - 5/10 - It had some very good actors that were severely hampered by the script. Appeared to be an attempt to turn Starship Troopers into Pitch Black.

Starship Troopers 3 - 3/10 - Nothing but making fun of, and dissing religion from what I can tell.

Starship Troopers Invasion - 7.6/10 - Much better writing than 2/3, but the animation left quite a bit to be desired. (the voice acting was decent though)

Computer fans, and my Mom trying to be quiet so as to hide the fact that she knows I'm up until 4:30AM so she can use it against me later.

Heading to bed.

That would depend on your insurance... Most don't.

Mower propelled stones are the biggest source of broken glass on stationary buildings.

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