Eh? Why does the video start and end where it does?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru1F29vuVKI&feature=related
Here's a "What would you do? Latino hate crime" one too.

The comments are interesting if nothing else.

And here's one dealing with Spanish-only speakers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCmLRA50iU4&feature=related
This one appears to be full of tough New Jersey types who come to the defense of the people.

Meh. Most major cities (like the one in this video) are gentrifying their black populations out of existence anyway. Affordable housing is an oxymoron in big cities like San Francisco, for example.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-10/bay-area/17121007_1_african-americans-black-families-public-housing
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-10-17/news/17267250_1_minimum-wage-california-budget-project-census-bureau

So the whole city of SF is like a store that says "You can't afford to buy that! GET OUT!"

Hmm. I dunno. Stewart seems to be implying that if Religions A through X are "OK with being humiliated", why can't Religions Y and Z be OK with it too. I don't think Religions A through Z are very uniform though. I just get this sense that Stewart is trying to apply some kind of left-wing sense of "equality of stupidity" to all the religions, and I don't think that works. Most Americans think Christianity as a whole, as stupid as it is, is far better/smarter than Islam as a whole. Stewart thanks the non-Muslim religions for taking the show's jokes on the chin so well, but surely we all recognize that Western Christian groups are at a very empowered and popular position compared to Western Islamic groups.

I mean, everyone in comedy knows that it's more OK to insult white people than it is to insult blacks. The two groups, as wholes, are very different in power and popularity. Then there's the issue of whether or not you're the insulter, a member of the group being insulted, if there's tensions between the two groups, and so forth.

By the way, if you happen to be a techno-savvy hard-line Muslim reading this post, I have one question for you: shouldn't your first problem, before Matt & Trey, be with the second most populous denomination of Islam, the Shi'a, who apparently have no problem with depictions of Muhammad? Is it off-base for me to ask that you sort this out amongst yourselves before requiring the non-believers to follow your religious edicts under threat of death?"
+5 insightful



Considering that most violence committed by Muslims is against other Muslims, and that there is a great deal of factional conflict between the various Muslim groups, I'm not sure this final point is very good.
The same people who might be offended by a depiction of Muhammad are ALREADY killing other Muslims for taking different viewpoints.

So saying "Don't kill Matt and Trey, continue to kill other Muslims as you've been doing!" seems pretty messed up.

Or, in other words, radical Muslims are fearful that a large faction of the faithful will splinter off and form a new denomination based on the worship of an episode of South Park.


I also found this part to be a very absurd statement. This is obviously NOT what a radical Muslim is going to be thinking if he goes out and tries to kill Matt and Trey. Hopefully it was not written seriously, because it outright mocks and humiliates the principle behind the opposition to depictions of Muhammad.

The narrator looks like Elrond O_O

Whenever the idea of money comes into the "should we execute them or not?" argument, I cringe. Massive amounts of wealth in this country is being spent on totally frivolous things. I read a book written by a Republican lady who said that half of America's money is spent on non-necessary things. Entertainment, vacations, automobiles, etc. The idea that we would kill people to save some money, when there is so much money being thrown around for hedonistic things, just seems incredibly wrong.

If we were living in say, Mozambique, where the average person makes 200 bucks a year or something around there, then I could OK the death penalty as a money saving measure. But in the US? Not so much.

damn she's hot. what is her ethnicity?

Just FYI, if you want to see Batman attacking someone from the victim's perspective while he glide attacks them, you can press R2. It's pretty awesome watching Batman descend from above this way

I really loved this game and thought Yahtzee got everything dead on. Boss fights were so bad. I also had weird headaches from playing the game for too long. But that's just me

Harumph. I still think violence is underrated amongst both the left and right-wings in American politics. Law is the same thing as violence. You can't have a law unless it's backed up by the violence of law enforcement officials. So laws are already a form of violence upon you. And you always have the choice to defend yourself, violently, against violence. The issue is just whether or not you can stay alive or free afterwards.

If you don't like a law, I don't think you should only use non-violent means to overturn it. If you care about overturning that law enough, never take violence off the table. Presidents never take the option of violence off the table when dealing with issues of policy, neither should you.

I guess it makes sense the left-wing is more into the "non-violent" protest stuff. After all, the number of weapons in the hands of US right-wingers, civilian and military, is probably 10x the number that is in the hands of US left-wingers. Not too many people from liberal regions of America rushing to fill the ranks of the NRA or the US Army.

So Obama is a Balrog? That's pretty cool.

bcglorf, you really think that Hitchens has done all this? "His book on Kissinger has done far more to stop the outrageous actions and policies of the west than you ever could with a gun." Honestly I don't think Hitchens has stopped anything. Nearly all the crimes he mentions in his book, I'm sure, have gone unpunished. Nearly all the criminals he shines a light on continue to walk free, with money in their pockets, and their bellies full.

Perhaps if Hitchens' book had entered the public mind as much as, say, the latest Transformers film, I could agree with you. But as it is, it seems like the only people who know about him and who have read his stuff are extremely small in number, and few are close to political power greater than a city council chair.

Anyway, I thought the end of the video was a bit odd. Hitchens gets furious about people criticizing American or British troops, claiming that they "defend you while you sleep". These soldiers are the enforcers of government law and policies. The same laws that prevent Kissinger, Bush, and other American war criminals from being punished. They (armed agents of the government) were basically responsible with defending Kissinger as he slept, too. How does Hitchens do these two things at once? 1) Argue that Kissinger is a war criminal and must be punished, and suggest that 2) the US soldiers protecting him are heroes.

Is the priority to first wage this "war within Islam", then after it's over, refocus our efforts on getting American war criminals punished?

If so, how easy is it to convince foreigners that Americans are liberators, punishers of the wicked, and not colonizers, if large-scale war criminals (who often have fond opinions of colonialism) go unpunished in America itself?

Furthermore, most of these soldiers he wants to celebrate are people who repeatedly vote against the ideologies of people like Hitchens, and few are for "women's rights" as Hitchens advocates for at the end of this video. They're not going to throw acid into a woman's face, but few think women are the intellectual equals of men, which makes me wonder if they even believe women should have the same number of votes as men.

Finally, is democracy itself even a worthy ideology to pursue? It seems clear to me that most Westerners believe their own societies to be far superior to other societies (politically, physically, intellectually, economically, militaristically, etc.), and that even if a global democracy was established tomorrow, most Westerners would desire more power than their population numbers would deserve. One need only look at how frustrated white conservatives have become in the past few years, thanks to the high population growth of non-white people in the country, to see an example of how quickly democratic philosophies are thrown out the window in order to protect one's freedom/wealth. See the current Health care debate for more examples.

Bruno was hot for this guy!

As a former socialist party usa member, i think it's quite flattering to be called a socialist. Einstein and Dr. King would not mind :-) Both were in the running for Person of the Century awards from numerous magazines, with the former winning quite a few of them..

This reminds me of when Jesse Jackson met up with Slobodan Milosevic and somehow got him to free two American soldiers, who had been taken POW... despite the fact that America was still attacking his country at the time (Kosovo war). I wonder what Jackson said to get such a thing to happen? And the same goes for here... what did Clinton do?

@Wingoguy, I somewhat agree. I can only assume the two had hoped to sneak into North Korea in order to report on the plight of the population. I think it's a brave thing to do for a journalist, especially considering how little money stories about the North Korean populace they would've gotten. I mean, let's be honest, most people would rather read a story about Michael Jackson than about the suffering of millions of people.