"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" -Isaac Asimov

Sorry you caved so quickly. You can only wake a sleeping giant.

Joyce is an ex farmer and one of the National party contributions to the Liberal/National coalition government at the moment. Blunt is probably a mild way to describe him. Another way would be remove the "bl" and replace with "c"... ; )

But yeah, this is another storm in a teacup caused by some dickhead saying something perfectly reasonable in the most creepy and unreasonable way possible.

A simple statement such as: "Mr Depp brought two dogs in without observing Australian quarantine regulations and has been notified that if he doesn't remove them within the next 50 hours, the dogs will be confiscated and unfortunately will need to be destroyed."

Taadaa, crisis fucking averted...

Joyce isn't sucking up to constituents, he's just being his usual charming self. The Nats are borderline irrelevant in this country now apart from making up the balance so the Liberals can actually manage to go toe to toe with Labor (the leftist party). Most Australian's saw this as Joyce being a colossal douche even while recognising that Depp did the wrong thing.

ps. Oliver is also completely wrong about the baby koala. You see those cold black eyes, dolls eyes? And you know how everything over here basically wants to murder the shit out of you in horrible ways? Tread warily lest you wake the sleeping giant...

ok, so you have a peaceful revolt...




...then what?

saying you're pissed is easy. Saying there is a problem is easy.

But where is your solution to address these ills. How do you plan to stop it from happening again?

I find it interesting that you seem to imply that violence is a tool of a state. That's rather disingenuous, don't you think? As if the state is more predisposed to use violence than other groups? the state, like every organization, is made up of people. so if the state is violent, it's because people are violent and we really haven't solved that problem yet, have we. Violence is still part of the human condition and not an inherent part of the state...or playing video games, etc.

I would argue that many of the conflicts we are currently in are because of monied interests and their influence on gov't. remove that influence as I suggested and I'd wager that we've have a less violent gov't.

and I'm sorry, I must have missed something, but are you implying that Obama personally shut down Occupy Wall Street? gonna need you to provide a citation for that. Speaking for my city. The local occupy group was evicted from it's spot by our governor, a republican, but not that it matters because the whole Occupy movement was poorly thought out to begin with. very few people want to camp out 24/7 on with college hipsters and homeless people. It was just a badly implemented idea....period. It was one of the few times I genuinely agreed with our governor. While I might have agreed with Occupy's intentions, they were absolutely ineffective at conveying any meaningful message and an absolute nuisance to the area.

Bottom line, is that as that Japanese general alluded to, America is a sleeping giant. For all the rhetoric and for all these ills you have mentioned, the average American citizen is still largely insulated from it. American life has not fundamentally changed during the administration of Bush and/or Obama despite what the pundits on either side try to cry wolf about. Because we have an all-volunteer military, even the average american citizen is largely insulated from our wars as well.

When those things change, then maybe you'll see something happen.

And yes, I know my view is optimistic. But optimism works. Wasn't that long ago that many things we take for granted today was viewed as optimistic but niave or unrealistic.

>> ^kymbos:

I think the US is changing, but it's not changing for the better. More fundamentalist, more corporate driven, more entrenched, more divided... That's change.


I think you're right. the fundies are surging, corporate influence is rising. These things aren't very sustainable though. We know this because it's happened before. Theocracies don't work and are in opposition to freedom. Plutocracy doesn't work and is in opposition to freedom. Just because we seem to have forgotten history doesn't make it any less true.

America does really have the whole sleeping giant thing about it. We're lazy, we ignore stuff, we let stuff slide. We see this stuff coming but do little to stop it. But eventually the fundies and the plutocrats will cross a line and that's when people will finally push back...and push back hard.

When that will happen though..who knows. So yeah, things are going to get worse before they get better. But that's how it usually works. I tend to consider it a given that there is going to be a 2nd American Civil War before I die.

http://videosift.com/video/Mastodon-Sleeping-Giant

1)Money. Lots and lots of money. See Iraq/Afghanistan. War is a racket.
2)If you look closely at the first shot in this particular video you can clearly see them. Pause the video at 0.17
3)You might want to look into who the residents of WT7 were. That's a very easy question to answer.
4)Small amounts of collateral damage are enough to wake the sleeping giant. Plus the trade centre building had just been re-insured.

>> ^MarineGunrock:

I want the dumb-fuck truthers to answer a couple of "simple" questions for me, or to STFU:
1)What is there to gain from it?
2)Where are the signature multi-level explosions used to fell a building?
3)How the fuck do you sneak all the explosives in with no one noticing?
4)Why would they bother making them fall straight down? Wouldn't sideways be better if you're going to kill a bunch of people?

No, he's simply saying that he doesn't want a throng of blue-collar workers to have any say in the political process. He only wants the elites to negotiate policy with other elites. I guess he's being ideologically consistent, at least with the Koch-suckers like Walker.

When you combine this legislation with the citizens' united decision, you are left with a very scary campaign financing landscape.

The only thing I hope is that this has awakened the sleeping giant that is Wisconsin grassroots politics.

I think he was referring to the grammar police ^

>> ^DrewNumberTwo:

I don't even understand the terms of his threat. Awaken a sleeping giant that is hostile to any Muslim or non-Muslim person? WTF does that mean?

It's an inept attempt to reference the video Thunderfoot made before this one on the recent southpark Muhammad episodes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84nMj3DQw80
In it he argues that if Muslims keep pushing and fighting our western way of life they may eventually awaken a sleeping giant that will make the Iraq war seem like the flailing arms of a new born child.
Whether that quote is entirely accurate or exactly how much would it take for the entire western world to decide "that's it, their going down" i am not one to answer, but what i guess he is saying is "if your in the habit of pissing on fences eventually your gonna end up in front of an electrified one".
And it is non-Muslim innocent person, which is essentially still a Muslim according to the qouran, us westerners need not apply.

>> ^DrewNumberTwo:

I don't even understand the terms of his threat. Awaken a sleeping giant that is hostile to any Muslim or non-Muslim person? WTF does that mean?

I don't even understand the terms of his threat. Awaken a sleeping giant that is hostile to any Muslim or non-Muslim person? WTF does that mean?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'rock, progressive rock, indie, 2006, sleeping giants' to 'rock, progressive rock, indie, 2006, sleeping giants, penguins having fun' - edited by rasch187

The thing with preemption is, how far do you preempt things? Some say that Russia is rebuilding itself right now and engaging in new cold war, the same is said of China. Could preemption of either of this nations benefit the US? Especially with China the case could be built as it's a communist nation...

I think culturally the Japanese people were different because of the acts of the Emperor of Japan to lull the nation into accepting occupational forces. I don't think the same would have happened with a preempted attack.

The whole attack on Pearl Harbor was not a success entirely, while alot of ships were destroyed the aircraft carriers were not, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto the mastermind of Pearl Harbor, is believed to have said "I'm afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with terrible resolve".

furrycloud-you would have to be at least 60-
53-63 it was Ike then Kennedy-After the assassination, elections have been engineered, and your vote has meant fuck-all
The delusional above who thinks Clinton was pretty good???....Yet another case of selective memory disorder, lack of overall knowledge of historical facts, and some idyllic,"My perfect world" bullshit thrown in-Clinton is a tool, one of the most ill-equipped to lead a nation-his wife is smarter and scarier-

Some folks only see something or someone as being good or bad if it fits their ideal world scenario, regardless of how they deal with the paradigm.....
jwray, all for opening the floodgates on freedoms here, and the bills cited do not have a lot to do with anything but matters of money and agenda-the shit Clinton allowed to be done, and that he abjectly neglected are his butt-fuck the U.S., legacy, not a few vetos that effect agenda-motivated minorities.

FDR engineered many a fistfuck for the future that guided the country to the sad state it is in today...33'-38'(New Deal) was a time of setting the place up for to fall ripe from the tree, the fruits of stolen (depression) American dreams-

Big war hawk.....conflict is continually in the process of being engineered, NO president within the current paradigm which involves the building of wealth capitol and commerce within a contrived and retrograde system is innocent.....

" I personally think Clinton was OK. At least his hawkish foreign policy worked and didn't get us into any long-term quagmires."-
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/9/29/25139.shtml
(The Sleeping Giant Clinton Fuck-Up.)
http://ssqq.com/ARCHIVE/intern03.htm
Dig a little deeper my friend....Bill and his Hillary are not to be fucked with in the arena of lies, deceit-the are some of the vilest of lackeys on the planet-Very usable.

"The sleeping giant awakes."

Never pass up an excuse to romanticize the non-existent morality of American military might.