This is an accurate point of view. It has been summarized by students of history as "Political change is the product of a radical minority."
We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant.
It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.....
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
This logic can be applied to anything and it's too convenient for an outsider to just lump a group of people together with other groups they don't identify with and say 'well, it's on you for not stopping those people you don't consider to be part of your tribe from doing all these things.' From Neptyder's point of view, he says ISIS isn't a Muslim organization and isn't acting in a way that represents what he understands Islam to be, so what impetus does he have to stop anyone from ISIS doing anything? As it applies to us, if you're an isolationist, do you have a duty to pick up a gun to prevent the military interventionism? Or further, Muslims can use the logic displayed here to say 'all peace loving Americans have a duty to stop the military from killing innocent people in drone attacks, and the fact that they refuse to proves they agree with the killing of innocent people.' What exactly is it you want people to do? LOL, your argument makes me laugh. Somehow reminds me of the puzzle of Franco and the Spanish civil war. Picture this. You are just some guy trying to travel through some villages. At each village guys with rifles ask you.. "Are you a Catholic or a Communist?" Your job is to answer right or they shoot you. But you never know which THEY are. The reduction of individuality into a binary decision is what was described in the German situation, and it has happened many other times in history. It's a valid warning, not to be shrugged off. You can laugh, of course. I'd prefer a counterpoint though. Or an answer to the question. |
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Yikes. I worry about what is coming as all these boomers retire. Even the ones that have saved often used the evil 401K. That's where you put up 100% of the money, take 100% of the risk, and if you are lucky you might get 30% of the profits. The future is poor friends.  Are you being facetious or serious in your terming of the "evil 401k?" Are you an advocate for an alternative system? I think they have become a legal scam. (Ok, maybe not evil). But many 401Ks are a bad deal for investors. They have many hidden fees and are mostly for making sick money on Wall St. Because of the employer contribution you may think that you are racking up the dollars. But you probably end up leaving a third of the money on the table that you could make with an index fun, for example. There is also the risk that is not talked about much. Some people seem to think that a 401K is a surefire way to fund your retirement. In fact the market could drop 50% next year or next week. If that happens as you get ready to retire... Well it's back to work for you Grandpa. I have a 401(k) and am charged about $13.50 per quarter, which comes out to about $50 a year. If I'm actively trading, I incur the normal transaction fees. I don't find that unreasonable. I don't know what other people do with their 401(k)s or what fees other people are paying, but I don't have any basis to support the claim that Wall Street is getting fat off the meager fees I'm paying. I can put my 401(k) funds in an index fund if I want, so I don't understand the criticism of the system. Since your retirement is your responsibility, if you don't save enough during your working life, you wait longer to retire. It seems pretty straight forward to me. As for the market turning down, there's risk in everything. Don't invest if you don't like risk, but the risk in holding cash is it depreciates. There's risk in action and there's risk in inaction. There's no such thing as a risk-less investment. The 401(k) isn't designed to make you rich though, it's designed to allow you to save and grow your retirement funds tax deferred over several decades so you can live off of it after retirement. You save for 50 or 60 years to fund the 20 years of your life you're not working. If you think it's designed to make you wealthy upon retirement, I think you misunderstand the system. It's not designed to be "foolproof" (as I stated, in investing nothing is); it's the most practical option that puts everyone's responsibility for their own retirement on themselves. |
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Yikes. I worry about what is coming as all these boomers retire. Even the ones that have saved often used the evil 401K. That's where you put up 100% of the money, take 100% of the risk, and if you are lucky you might get 30% of the profits. The future is poor friends. Are you being facetious or serious in your terming of the "evil 401k?" Are you an advocate for an alternative system? |
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You were on the verge of being reasonable for several posts, then you left for a few days and came back with BS like don't got time to read, so here's a bunch of strawmen and garbage diatribes. It's disappointing this thread turned out like this. I was hoping for something far more enlightened.
I mean, you could really call me out for saying "don't got time to read" by quoting such a post, but you can't because it's not there. I'm behind on this thread, so I'll just assume the past few pages is a lot of "Gee I wish the U.S. didn't have a veto so the U.N. could kill the Jews."
I was paraphrasing of course, but there's what you requested: You indicating you were dismissing everything without reading it.You modified my quote. Here is the original: You were on the verge of being reasonable for several posts, then you left for a few days and came back with BS like don't got time to read, so here's a bunch of strawmen and garbage diatribes. It's disappointing this thread turned out like this. I was hoping for something far more enlightened.
Your critique would be more convincing if there were a post somewhere in the thread stating, for example, some relevant action the U.N. could take if it weren't for U.S. influence. I mean, you could really call me out for saying "don't got time to read" by quoting such a post, but you can't because it's not there. To me it's quite clear that when I wrote "quoting such a post" I was referring to a hypothetical post by someone else giving some "relevant action the U.N. could take if it weren't for U.S. influence." Instead you took away the first sentence to make it look like I was asking for you to quote a post in which I was dismissing without reading. If you did this on purpose, that's some A+ dishonesty. If you really didn't understand what I was asking for, then we are -- quite literally -- writing in different languages. Yes, I thought you were speaking of two different topics, and I didn't understand how the first sentence applied to the second, so I edited out the part about the UN because I hadn't said anything about the UN. For that matter, I still don't understand your point there or how it is a response to what I said, but in the interest of getting back to something more meaningful, am willing just to chalk it up as my loss. A useful discussion about this issue would involve making a sequence of clear, unambiguous true-or-false style statements and having people who disagree indicate which they think are true and which they think are false. That's the first step to determining the nature of a disagreement. I tried to do this. Most of the participants on the thread ignored these statements and ignored clarifying questions I tried to ask. They continued to simply assert that there was some country called Palestine (there wasn't) that was "illegally invaded" by Jews (rather than there being waves of immigration) and that there was some kind of unspecified "agreement" that Israel made and is not holding to. I challenge anyone to simply count the number of clear statements I've made and clear questions I've asked that have been completely ignored. The people expecting me to respond to them when they're not responding to me are the ones being unreasonable.
In the end things will probably work out for everyone. The Jew haters will get their dead Jews and I'll get to exterminate the Nazi human species.
So are you contributing to a useful discussion here, or are all those posts I quoted from you not constructive? You have very good points when you're following the advice I bolded above, so let's get back to that and cut out all that shit you keep posting.I already did my part by putting a number of labelled clear true-or-false style statements and either indicating whether I believed them to be true-or-false, often with explanations as to why. If other people were interested in having a useful discussion, they would take some of these statements and say whether they believe them to be true or false and give some explanation. Their explanations could involve new true-or-false statements to consider and discuss. The fact that no one is doing this supports my belief that this thread is not really about discussing the conflict. The thread is about demonizing Jews. There are apparently a lot of people on bitcointalk who think it's very important to keep Jew hatred threads high on the Politics and Society forum, from this one to the "Jews did 9/11" one. Something is rotten here. Yes, I am disappointed in the lack of response to those instances. At the same time, look what does get responded to: intentionally inflammatory posts which make it easy to ignore the quality ones. The same way you get caught up on the idiot who posts garbage like "International Zionism Did 911–23 facts." If someone is clearly an idiot, don't even engage them, their ideas certainly aren't worth validating as something that needs to be defended against. Hopefully getting back to something useful, I would like to ask a few questions to get your views on them: 1) Do the Palestinians have any legitimate claim to an independent state or should the state of Palestine never exist? 2) Do Jews have the ultimate right (as in it can pre-empt all other claims) to Jerusalem? (I understand the city to be claimed by Palestinians and Israelis as a capital.) That is, does either group have a sole claim to the city, or should/can it exist as a capital of two independent nations? 3) Do you believe the expansion of Jewish settlements into what the Palestinians claim is Palestinian lands is justified? (Or do you believe Palestinians have no legitimate land claims, so the question is moot?) 4) And finally, if there should be a two-state solution, what border should Israel occupy now? Was the 1947 plan that was devised by the UN inherently flawed or biased against Israel, or was it only the Arab wars against Israel that made the original plan unworkable? I'm just looking for brief responses initially and we can get into more color and the justification of the answers after that (if we hold different views on something). Mostly I'm asking because I'm trying to figure out what I think, but I don't know the things I don't know. |
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You can't keep your anecdotes straight. First you say Israel is helping ISIS, then you say only Muslims support ISIS. You might run into less problems with sketchy facts if you post a source to back up your claims once in awhile.
OK... I will list the facts: 1. All ISIS members are Sunni Muslims 2. ISIS has mostly targeted non-Muslims 3. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel are supporting the ISIS, for their own reasons. I'll change my claim that "only Muslims support the ISIS" to "all ISIS members are Sunni Muslims". Hope that everything is clear now. This is much better. When I get a chance I'll circle back to this about #1, because I came across some reading that indicated this was not entirely true. When I find it again, I'll post it. Here's one article I had found about how ISIS recruits non-Muslims (so they aren't all Sunni Muslims). There was a better article I had come across that talked about how some people went to 'work' for ISIS not because of ideology but simply because they paid wages like a job, and there was no work for them otherwise, but they started abandoning ISIS because they were never paid as promised. I can't find that article now, but this one makes my point as well. http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-recruiting-westerners-how-islamic-state-goes-after-non-muslims-recent-converts-west-1680076 |
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This may be splitting hairs at this point, but what really is the difference between burning somebody to death and stoning them to death? Is it just a personal preference, or are you taking something else into account, because I consider them both barbaric forms of punishment.
Barbaric forms of punishment are required for crimes which are of barbaric nature. Simple jail terms, with access to 5-star food and video-game consoles will only encourage these sort of crimes. These people should be made to suffer. Jail: A five-star retreat in the mind of bryant.coleman. Way to stay grounded in reality. Do you need proof? Check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgujwijPwxohttp://www.damncoolpictures.com/2009/03/5-star-prison-in-austria.htmlAn inmate sunbathes on the deck of his bungalow on Bastoy:  So you came across a rehabilitation facility (as differentiated from a prison) in Austria- who has a much more progressive view of incarceration than the US to begin with, and for which no violent criminals would be housed in- and are representing all prison conditions to be like this. Is that the point you're making? Because that seems to be your point, that people who commit barbaric acts will wind up in a facility like this, so we better just brutalize them instead. |
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This is an accurate point of view. It has been summarized by students of history as "Political change is the product of a radical minority."
We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant.
It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.....
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
This logic can be applied to anything and it's too convenient for an outsider to just lump a group of people together with other groups they don't identify with and say 'well, it's on you for not stopping those people you don't consider to be part of your tribe from doing all these things.' From Neptyder's point of view, he says ISIS isn't a Muslim organization and isn't acting in a way that represents what he understands Islam to be, so what impetus does he have to stop anyone from ISIS doing anything? As it applies to us, if you're an isolationist, do you have a duty to pick up a gun to prevent the military interventionism? Or further, Muslims can use the logic displayed here to say 'all peace loving Americans have a duty to stop the military from killing innocent people in drone attacks, and the fact that they refuse to proves they agree with the killing of innocent people.' What exactly is it you want people to do? |
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Dude that wouldn't work, humans inevitably make mistakes. And you can't compare police officers to doctors. Doctors' work is orderly, there is method and every case has a very clear path to a resolution, if procedures are not respected or the doctor is negligent then he should definitely pay for it. There is no order as such in police work, they have to prepare for the unexpected. There are just too many factors involved, especially when lives are being threatened to be able to say with certainty that the cop is to blame.
And yet courts award settlements all the time based on police officers' bad actions. Those are the instances this is referring to, not instances where cops act justifiably in a violent situation. The situations where they shoot an unarmed civilian, or abuse a suspect, or doctor evidence, or any other instance in which governments have paid out settlements for the bad actions of cops. |
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Even if each individual officer is legally required to sign up for liability insurance personally*, the government will always find a way to reimburse them for that expense with taxpayer dollars, no matter what any law says.
Obviously, if you're enacting a law to require cops to foot the bill for their own insurance risks, the intent is to take the liability off of taxpayers, so I don't buy your conclusion. The cops won't quietly acquiesce to this new law, which effectively reduces their salary. They would obviously expect a pay revision to incorporate this new "cost". Most probably, a group insurance plan, would make sense economically. In the end, the taxpayers would foot the bill. Obviously cops don't do anything voluntarily, which is why the point is it's not voluntary. They fight civilian oversight, they fight accountability, they fight pension reform, they fight body cameras; I would expect them to continue to fight anything, including something that would make them economically responsible for their actions. But there's no reason to think that these changes which would be forced on them would be borne by taxpayers who are forcing them to accept the changes through a change in the law. |
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The guy should definitely learn history, or at least stop spreading disinformation.
USA joined the fray only once it became apparent that Soviet Union was winning. All previous pleas for help were ignored by Roosevelt and Churchill for years before that.
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, US declares war on Japan, Germany declares war on US, US declares war on Germany. This sequence of events doesn't support your indication the US got involved only once it became apparent the USSR was winning. The US joined the European fray because Germany declared war on the US. |
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You can't keep your anecdotes straight. First you say Israel is helping ISIS, then you say only Muslims support ISIS. You might run into less problems with sketchy facts if you post a source to back up your claims once in awhile.
OK... I will list the facts: 1. All ISIS members are Sunni Muslims 2. ISIS has mostly targeted non-Muslims 3. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel are supporting the ISIS, for their own reasons. I'll change my claim that "only Muslims support the ISIS" to "all ISIS members are Sunni Muslims". Hope that everything is clear now. This is much better. When I get a chance I'll circle back to this about #1, because I came across some reading that indicated this was not entirely true. When I find it again, I'll post it. |
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You were on the verge of being reasonable for several posts, then you left for a few days and came back with BS like don't got time to read, so here's a bunch of strawmen and garbage diatribes. It's disappointing this thread turned out like this. I was hoping for something far more enlightened.
I mean, you could really call me out for saying "don't got time to read" by quoting such a post, but you can't because it's not there. I'm behind on this thread, so I'll just assume the past few pages is a lot of "Gee I wish the U.S. didn't have a veto so the U.N. could kill the Jews."
I was paraphrasing of course, but there's what you requested: You indicating you were dismissing everything without reading it.Any fair minded person reading this thread will see I responded "reasonably" to people who made reasonable posts. I responded dismissively to people who repeat nonsense while being utterly incapable of comprehending information contrary to what they already believe (e.g., redzeronazi).
I consider myself fair-minded, but I do not agree with this representation. You have responded reasonably to some posts, and have been very dismissive of others. Reasonable people make their points with the aim of convincing the other side, not convincing themselves how right they are. As you indicate, some people here are not capable of changing their worldview, but take a look at your attitude here and realize you are just as guilty of that as the people you rail against and become a dick to for failing to change their views. When you get frustrated at people holding other viewpoints, you are prone to hyperbole and a violent mentality, but you seem to think that because you view the world as 'Jew hating' that it is justified. Fair minded people disagree with violence.
Here are the most recent examples of you exemplifying this behavior and building strawmen so you can claim victory, not further this discussion:To clarify about my missing post: I wrote a massive wall of text replying to everything in great detail and demolishing all arguments against the legitimacy and in favor of the right of return. The post mention the KKK was meant to be a clarification of a small part of that post. I probably clicked "edit" instead of "quote" and edited by massive post to almost nothing.
Since presenting claims without evidence is popular in this thread, I'll just expect you to accept that I won the argument completely in that lost post. You're welcome.
Holy shit. I argued so well in this thread that I became a "Full Member" and get to have an avatar. In honor of the thread I thought I'd remember a very special day in Palestinian history: September 11, 2001. What a happy day for them.
Somehow I totally fucked up my last post. This is all that's left. Fuck it. I'm not typing it again. Short version: You're all fucking lying Jew hating Nazis.
And why are the "Palestinian people oppressed"? Because they're fucking terrorists! Every chance they have ever been given to help make peace they have used to make war. It's like saying the KKK is oppressed, which they actually kind of are, but I am 100% in favor of the "oppression" of violent racists. I'm funny that way. (The KKK was also formed as resistance to occupation, by the way.)
Just to clarify in case any of you are KKK supporters. While I hate the KKK, I in no way mean to suggest they're as bad as the Palestinians.
If Israel is destroyed, I will devote the rest of my life to the extermination of the human species. Any species that goes down this road again less than 100 years after the holocaust needs to be fucking wiped out.
You don't come across as fair-minded. This collection of posts is just garbage, but the difference between them and someone else posting similar crap on the opposite side is you claim to know better about having a useful discussion:A useful discussion about this issue would involve making a sequence of clear, unambiguous true-or-false style statements and having people who disagree indicate which they think are true and which they think are false. That's the first step to determining the nature of a disagreement. I tried to do this. Most of the participants on the thread ignored these statements and ignored clarifying questions I tried to ask. They continued to simply assert that there was some country called Palestine (there wasn't) that was "illegally invaded" by Jews (rather than there being waves of immigration) and that there was some kind of unspecified "agreement" that Israel made and is not holding to. I challenge anyone to simply count the number of clear statements I've made and clear questions I've asked that have been completely ignored. The people expecting me to respond to them when they're not responding to me are the ones being unreasonable.
In the end things will probably work out for everyone. The Jew haters will get their dead Jews and I'll get to exterminate the Nazi human species.
So are you contributing to a useful discussion here, or are all those posts I quoted from you not constructive? You have very good points when you're following the advice I bolded above, so let's get back to that and cut out all that shit you keep posting. |
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The US does way more for NATO and the UN than they do for it.
We're damned if we do and damned if we don't every single time, so I'd say fuck it to both.
If we want to get involved in a given situation because it impacts our interests or we can see the overwhelming need to stave off some crazy domino like disaster, then fine, otherwise what good does it do the US to have mini powers lined up for what is basically moral support? As events in the Middle East have shown, there is absolutely zero benefit for us, while we get to play world cop at the expense of a shitload of money, while these other countries get to diddle on the sidelines waiting for daddy to come along and clean up their backyard and then turn and bitch after the fact.
I've seen enough of this shit. Screw NATO. Screw the UN.
You want our help? Ask for it. Pay for it. And STFU at the hell the US Army, Marines et al unleash at your request because the rest of the world is seemingly unable to handle the heavy lifting without our help the majority of the time. It ain't a fuckin' bake sale they're bringing to town so know what you're getting when you pick up that phone.
The American military is not a mercenary force and it should not be an interventionist force. Other nations should not be able to request it to do the 'heavy lifting' if only they pay for it. I disagree with this attitude. |
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I have lived in Missouri before and can say it's not all like this. This sounds like a very sad/wrong situation.
I find it interesting previous Mayor "held the office for 37 years". Almost 40 years as Mayor is pratically a dictator ship. I've never had a Mayor near this long that I know of.
I grew up in a village that had the same mayor for 40 years. He was very much viewed as unassailable and was supported by all the local businesses because he ran a very business-friendly village. After he won his last election, he stepped down and had the Village Board (who always ran on the same ticket as him) appoint his son mayor so he wouldn't have to win the office in an election. The son then won reelection the next cycle, so I'd say the nepotism payed off. Small town politics is usually the worst form. |
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This looks like a country heading for disaster, think about it, you wouldn't put your life savings in Bitcoin.
They're basing their entire economy on Bitcoin, too volatile.
Volatility doesn't affect anything if everything is in that same currency . And they don't have any economy yet .  So they only have to get the rest of the world to switch to bitcoin and they should be fine! |
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I rather like the idea of Rosa Parks. She's a great symbol of peaceful civil disobedience and standing up to injustice, which stands in stark contrast to Jackson's violent and forced relocation of thousands of indians.
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There are things that you and I don't know but governments do. Not talking any sides, not saying that killing innocent* people is justified but sometimes Nations are required to take actions which are necessary to keep others safe.
The point of due process is that there are some actions governments are never justified in taking. When we say life and liberty are absolute rights, not granted by the government so therefore they cannot be taken by governments, those things are intended literally. That means governments never have the authority to take those rights without due process, and if the government takes an action that results in an accidental death, due process was not served. |
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You were on the verge of being reasonable for several posts, then you left for a few days and came back with BS like don't got time to read, so here's a bunch of strawmen and garbage diatribes. It's disappointing this thread turned out like this. I was hoping for something far more enlightened.
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You led yourself off a cliff of logic.
"effectively no need" ≠ no need
The EFFECT of courts almost always granting government agents unreasonable doubt, sovereign immunity, qualified immunity, et al is that government agents can feel they EFFECTIVELY have carte blanche.
If there was a law that officially said "no matter what any government agent does, he/she can NEVER be prosecuted or suffer any real consequences whatsoever for it, period", then I would remove the "effectively", and you could pull yourself back up the logic cliff.
The insurance I proposed has nothing to do with what cops feel and how they react due to whether or not they feel insured everything to do not forcing tax payers to pay a financial penalty when cops brutalize someone. Cops would be paying for that expense themselves now since the insurance premiums for police brutality would be paid exclusively by cops. Your last response has me wondering if we are even discussing the same thing. Perhaps we haven't been and I didn't realize it. And, back to square one: Even if each individual officer is legally required to sign up for liability insurance personally*, the government will always find a way to reimburse them for that expense with taxpayer dollars, no matter what any law says.
* as in pay his/her own premiums Obviously, if you're enacting a law to require cops to foot the bill for their own insurance risks, the intent is to take the liability off of taxpayers, so I don't buy your conclusion. |
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So basically you've discovered a Reddit AMA that US politicians regularly use.
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