And blacks in the west start miles ahead of blacks in Africa. So where do we draw the line? Equal opportunity and equal treatment are the very best we should be able to expect in this world because as soon as you put your thumb on the scales, one way or another, someone is going to feel cheated. That will, in turn, become resentment, fair or not, and the cycle will continue.

You trace back every persons family tree and you'll end up with both ancestors that had the boot on their neck, and ancestors who wore the boot. If we carry the sum of the sins of our forebears, then there is not a single person alive today that isn't guilty of some horrid event. A million monkeys with a million typewriters will eventually write Mein Kampf...

I agree with most of what the Governator said, and noted the things he didn't say eg. he didn't say it's okay to physically attack someone expressing a hateful idea.

More importantly, I think Daryl Davis has the solution:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kkk-klu-klux-klan-members-leave-black-man-racism-friends-convince-persuade-chicago-daryl-davis-a74895
96.html

Or Martin Luther King: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Which is why you don't destroy history, you don't shout down people expressing hateful ideas, you do not dehumanise them and in not doing that, you do not become the monster you are trying to fight.

"How could anything be bigger than Halo? I guess we'll find out."

Halo isn't even in the top 50 selling game franchises, and no, you won't find out anything. Everybody in this video is a deluded, lying corporate hack just like the Bungie forebearers that paraded around E3 2000 making PC gamers salivate worldwide before selling out to M$ a month later and claiming the series would never come to PC. Halo turned out mediocre anyways and was only taken seriously by bandwagon bro gamers. Karma is the only dish left on Bungie'$ menu.

The majority of the world have felt they were being treated unfairly by their masters for at least 50,000 years. This is not even news.

All state rule is and always has been oligarchy. Any other term is a fantasy - even monarchy let alone democracy.

And they wont beat the inheritors any more than any of their crushed forebears did.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

I actually watched the show last night when it aired and I was disappointed.
And I'm not alone, as this article, this article, and this article have all lambasted the first four episodes.

". . . at it's worst, the show chokes on its own sanctimony."

But worse than that is that Sorkin could've done so much better.


>> ^RhesusMonk:

The show isn't all didactic ranting (as well founded in this case as I think it is). The West Wing is the greatest television ever produced. Give the man more than four and a half minutes and I'm sure we'll be pleased.>> ^Trancecoach:
Disappointed that Aaron Sorkin has gone the way of the "Old Man Syndrome," where things "used to be better" until the younger generation came along and effed it all up... The reality is that the younger generations are stuck with the mess that their forebears have left for them, so if you really need to blame someone for the mess we're in, start with yourself, old man.
Still, the show has potential and, unless we dissolve the nation state, we're in to recreate the 20th century, and we all remember how great that was the 1st time!

The show isn't all didactic ranting (as well founded in this case as I think it is). The West Wing is the greatest television ever produced. Give the man more than four and a half minutes and I'm sure we'll be pleased.>> ^Trancecoach:

Disappointed that Aaron Sorkin has gone the way of the "Old Man Syndrome," where things "used to be better" until the younger generation came along and effed it all up... The reality is that the younger generations are stuck with the mess that their forebears have left for them, so if you really need to blame someone for the mess we're in, start with yourself, old man.
Still, the show has potential and, unless we dissolve the nation state, we're in to recreate the 20th century, and we all remember how great that was the 1st time!

Disappointed that Aaron Sorkin has gone the way of the "Old Man Syndrome," where things "used to be better" until the younger generation came along and effed it all up... The reality is that the younger generations are stuck with the mess that their forebears have left for them, so if you really need to blame someone for the mess we're in, start with yourself, old man.

Still, the show has potential and, unless we dissolve the nation state, we're in to recreate the 20th century, and we all remember how great that was the 1st time!

Funny how these remakes/sequels/prequels/reboots/reimagainings do kind of give you a SENSE of having watched a classic but without any of the emotion or gravitas that made it remembered in the first place. A 23 year old girl told me she liked Singer's Star Trek 'because it wasn't like sci-fi'. I passed a bunch of middle aged women a while back and caught the words "..doctor manhattan.."

Modern marketing is reshaping, monetizing and pushing EVERYTHING that was interesting, exciting and cult, into a sort of vanilla paste to be squeezed into the minds of people who have less and less ideas about life but who vaguely know that these titles are remembered for decades for some reason.. it seems some extended cartoony dance-fight for the boys and some saccharine melodramatic romance for the girls is all you need to get in there.

The world is run by inheritees.
They can't be expected to know how great things were done by their forebears.
They do however own the show and are forced by their own need for self respect to believe they are entitled to make creative decisions WAY beyond them.

What are they going to do? Imitate and resell the past till its worth nothing. Anyone want to take this bet: spiderman reboot reboot reboot by 2020, Lawrence of Arabia with Robert pattinson by 2015, and on and on until we all kill ourselves.
As long as they do Krull with Samuel Jackson I'll go quietly.

Even if capital punishment was morally legitimate (which I don't think it is), and even if we could justifiably say that each of the 234 executed prisoners was actually guilt of the crimes for which s/he was sentenced (which I don't believe is even statistically accurate), it would still be grotesque to react to the execution of human life with cheers and applause, as the audience does here.

Certainly, a mood of solemnity and regret would be more appropriate. Meanwhile, Christian Conservative Republicans hoot and howl over executions in the same way their forebears reveled in watching the Christians being thrown to the lions for entertainment. Such hypocrisy is not just shocking and appalling, it's indefensibly dangerous.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

See the pattern here? We have all these groups who point to past injustices, and use it as justification to make THEIR OWN evils sound somehow more acceptable. I reject all such self-excuses as evil. Pure, 100%, unadulterated evil.


Ahh crap, I agree with this as well... =\

People, generally, do not want equality, they want supremacy. The slave becomes the master, the oppressed becomes the oppressor. And they hide behind historic crimes against their forebears as excuses.

It's amazing to me how ensconsed in the bubble the right is these days.

Let's break it down:

1. Ideological subversion propagation - Radical conservatives begin pushing their ideology to all members of society through churches, schools, and supposedly independent policy research "think tanks". This begins in the early 30's, and is a systematic campaign aimed at chipping away at the credibility of embedded liberalism, America's original ideology. The "threat of communism" is conflated with traditional American values like empathy, solidarity, and equality.
   
   
2. Destabilization - The 1960's reads literally like a textbook example of a country in crisis. A presidential assassination, two proxy wars, a mexican standoff with nuclear weapons, a counterculture protest movement, race relations getting strained with protests and violence, and the then-dominant Democratic party coming apart at its seams over disagreements about the war and civil rights.
   
   
3. Crisis - This one is clear. The oil crisis of the 1970's was our key takeover crisis moment. It basically ushered in an end to embedded liberalism as the American way of life. So many aspects of our political life and the way our economy was run was radically changed in the aftermath of that crisis, even though it was a walk in the park compared to today's economic problems.
   
   
4. Normalization - Conservative Republicans won 3 terms in a row, from 1980 until 1992, followed by a conservative, Southern Democrat who won in part because a third party candidate split Republican support. Party-line economists have treated the works of John Maynard Keynes the way their forebears treated the work of Karl Heinrich Marx -- they pretended it had nothing worthwhile to say, and tried their best to erase it from academic discourse. The Democrats of today consider reforms Republicans proposed in 1992 massive ideological win for the left.
   

Take the bananas out of your ears, morons.

Anyways, this is actually a pretty astute observation about how radical political and economic change happens. It's not necessarily planned like our conservative takeover was, but the framework for all ideological revolutions start with an ideology becoming commonly known, then during a period of destabilization and crisis, people may turn to the new ideology.

This is literally what more than a few libertarian bloggers say is their raison d'etre -- to make sure the ideology is lying around for when a crisis hits.

However, anyone who thinks some Russian-led infiltration of "Marxist-Lenninist" ideology happened or is happening is fucking deluded. It would've been a real trick considering your average American doesn't have a fucking clue what Marxism is...because the right stigmatized knowledge of it!

The whole point is that Israel has been attacked by rockets from these bozos for years. I'd say they've been remarkably patient and more than forebearing. So Hamas is whining because Isreal is responding with weapons that are much more effective than thiers. Well that's the risk you run when you deliberately provoke a superiour enemy. If you can't handle the response then you don't provoke it in the first place. Isreal wouldn't be doing anything if Hamas wasn't being a bunch of idiotic jackasses.

But the whole point is that Hamas wanted this to happen. They don't care that thier people are killed in the response. They expect it and - even worse - they DESIRE it. They set up operations in civilian zones with the expectation that there will be tertiary casualties. Then they run around with video cameras and send tapes to news outlets in the full expectation that useful idiots like the guy who made this vid will act like it was all Isreal's fault.

my15minutes: the foundation of communism is collectivism. the abolition of private property is a corollary.

januari : if i walk into a field of cows and exclaim "theres sh*t everywhere" am i closed minded or lacking reason? how is this any different?

asmo: you don't deserve articulate and polite. you deserve a dunce hat and a chair in the corner. don't worry i'm sure it wont be lonely as you have just shown you can easily put words in other peoples mouths. just pretend theres a face behind those words who actually wants to talk to a dunce.

ridesallyridenc: you don't even know the basis for what you list, so you are in no position to speak of human rights. the men who wrote those words knew very clear the foundation of what they had created. you do not. you are merely riding the coattails of your forebears.

gwiz665: i have no problem with voluntary altruism (in fact i encourage it). the only type of altruism i speak out against is the forced variety. it is not altruism if you are forced to help others with physical violence. altruism has a desirable place in a social philosophy, and no place in a system of law.

Gravity... gravity...
gravity...

you never see gravity...

You never see anything....



We are slowly becoming idiots due to these sort of scientific simplifications. There is an ever growing gap between human experience and the theories we use to control nature, to predict.

Scratch Dawkins and you'll find a man searching for the key to the riddle of existence... and the answer is sadly lacking (even purely theoretical knowledge is power - it too corrupts)


On Exactitude in Science

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.


Jorge Luis Borges