Call em for what they are VoodooV, no need to candy-coat the sentiment or facts, they're media whores be they black, fe-male, she-male, cunt-bag or douche-nozzle, they all milk off the same teat of distract and subvert while being paid to fuck minds with tired programming-Celebrity is the double-edged sword wielded usually to lure dumb motherfuckers into programmed oblivion-Never trust anyone who's 'nice' to everyone and seems to smile more than they fucking remember to breathe-Usually a shit-sandwich buried under the free crisps there a-waiting for ya in the lunch pail...Fuck Ellen and fuck the shit outta Oprah and her skinny-fat-fat-skinny-book-of-the-week-peddlin' ass..... they are opportunistic shit-heals the both of em. doing but nothing meaningful for the planet besides foot-printing carbon more than you or I and our minions combined...

And to alll the trolls who love to call the same on others with dissenting opinions?? Fuck You where you live.

Ummm what if we had a functioning democracy, then isn't Tax the right thing to do to pay for the things we voted on? Taxes aren't the problem, the fact that democracy is constantly subverted is.

Civil disobedience to combat the shit: Everyone should start now speaking freely of everything from bringing down office buildings with exploding pig's bladders to disrupting nationwide power grids with the power of Pokemon attached to Charizard provided Fire Energy...

Write unintelligible and nonsensical letters to congressmen and senators with return addresses from any and all intelligence apparatus

Wear (at least once a week) a crisp, company-man suit with that little white coiled communications wire dangling out of an ear and walk around in federal buildings and court houses....(Make sure the slacks are ass-less)

Subvert, misdirect, confuse, stifle and incinerate the insects that hold the reigns of this shitstorm factory of servers-

Attend open sessions of congress and laugh manically whenever anyone starts speaking. ABOUT ANYTHING-Bring a hundred people with you...

There's all sorts of effectual mayhem to take part in, your "vote" at this particular stage in the game, means FUCK-ALL

@Confucius

thank you so very much for taking the time to clarify your position.
but i think we are in a fundamental disagreement.
and here is why:

1.manning approached wikileaks.not the other way around.
2.is manning a traitor or patriot? i guess it depends on the perspective.
but manning was quite clear his reasons behind revealing those documents and none of those reasons were of being naive' or subverted by a third party.

when you consider the oath of military responsibility,an i oath i took over 25 years ago,the line that stands out is "to protect from enemies both foreign and domestic".
could those documents be seen as subverting the american people?
and if so,would that not make revealing those documents a patriotic act?

again,perspective and i guess we disagree.

conversely, if we use your premise then we would have to view this man:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
as a traitor.
now the 70,000 plus documents HE revealed exposed the gulf of tonkin AND extremely sensitive data concerning the vietnam war.i would go as far to say that without this mans courage (yes..courage) to expose the lies of our government,vietnam may have lasted for a much longer time.ellisberg fascillitated the beginning of the end of the vietnam war

the documents manning revealed just left the american government red faced and embarrassed but nothing of strategic value.ellisberg on the other hand revealed much MUCH more.

traitor or patriot? by your definition:traitor and a far worse one than manning.

and on that we disagree.

what we agree on is that governments lie.
we are in unison on this point but we diverge on how to deal with the situation.

you suggest to work within the bounds of journalism or becoming a politician.
now who is being the naive one?
this implies that the 4th estate is in perfect functioning order and that politicians are informed on all matters.

i submit that neither is the case.
a corporate run new media which engages mainly in sensationalism and hyperbolic opinion rhetoric and a legislature that is mostly subserviant to their financial backers( basically wall street) are not the institutions to tackle and uncover government malfeasance and outright lies.

they have been corrupted.see:iraq war

so i find it disturbing when the government hi-jacks 200 ap reporters emails and phone records.

or when a low level private reveals low level ambassador documents.

or my government's justice department prosecutes SIX people under the espionage act but not ONE indictment concerning wall street.

the message is clear:we are the US government.fuck with us and we will fuck you up.citizen or non-citizen.
there will be no journalism.
there will be no leaking of anything.
sit down and shut up.

or we will ruin you.

government by the people for the people right?

It should be pointed out that the richest in America and those who benefited hugely from the bailout can't even be found on census data. You have to do A LOT of study to actually find out they exist, it's something like 1% of the top 1%. They have serious influence, and benefit from a crooked system.

Also for the broader point of inequality. The point of the battle against it is because those on the lesser side have been being hammered for following the rules. You work and work for years with the idea that you'll get ahead, and that's taken away from you. This is how the Tea Party came about, their grievances are legitimate before they were sort of taken away from them by more powerful interests.

The point is, democracy suffers hugely when you have inequality. Ancient Greece (Aristotle) had the idea to fix this is by making the society more equal, therefore you wouldn't have the poor using their power of numbers to subvert democracy against the rich. America had a similar problem in the early days, instead of working towards equality, they worked towards stifling democracy. By putting most of the power in the hands of the wealthy Senate, it made sure that democracy wouldn't get out of hand and the rich white guys can keep what they stole.

Look this isn't something that's right or left. The right and the left are together on this, we don't like tyrannical powers trying to control us. A corporation with it's top down infrastructure is the basic definition of tyrannical. Add that to the fact that corporations dictate how our democracy is run, you have a system that isn't functioning and needs to be fixed.

Our Democracy isn't functional, it needs to be taken down and replaced.

Why do you think Direct Democracy is not a good idea? Has there been an example in history where it has turned out worse results than our form of Democracy?

As to the video, it doesn't really matter. Our democracy is fundamentally broken, and it's designed that way. Aristotle and John Adams could see that having a system where the "mob" could rule over the minority constantly wouldn't be a fair system because they just redistribute wealth and harm the rich. However they came to two opposite conclusions, Aristotle decided the answer was to have greater equality. John Adams reasoned that you have to subvert democracy, which is basically where the Rich Ass Senate comes from.

There is no reason why Direct democracy wouldn't work, it at the very least would be better than what we have. An Empire, designed to stifle the voices of it's people and lives for profit today over sustainability tomorrow.

That's all well and good, but people don't hold religion in a historical context -- they subvert science beneath these mythical stories and cling to their interpretations of said stories as 'gospel truth' above anything else, empirical or otherwise.>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

The Christians most likely lived in and around greek culture dominated by roman law. The Homeric tails and the iliad most likely dominated the prevailing mindset of their area, though, not as much as the hay day of greece. The punishment for not obeying the Gods was pretty drastic, you wouldn't want to be the one to do it unless you were super brave. The bible talks about entire towns of sinners being wiped out or an entire kingdom falling for the sins of a single king, pretty drastic. We must remember not to think in our own context, but of someone whom is bought in to the idea of communing with the creator(s) of existence. It is easy to scarecrow religion to death, but in a way, it was early science...trying to put the world in context the best way we knew how.
>> ^Trancecoach:
... therefore, let's kill each other over what's true or not true on the basis of these stories, shall we.>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
>> ^TheJehosephat:
Did she say 4th century... and then say 150-200 years after Christ?
Which is it?

Things were seldom written down, the actual bible stories of mark, matthew, ect, were not written by them nor where they written in those times. So, what I think she meant is the story most likely started at around that time and was then transcribed much later. Studying biblical history from a historic perspective instead of a religious one is pretty fascinating and very hard. Jesus was a popular figure and had many different story lineages until codification much much later in christian history. Just because it it written down doesn't mean it is true or accurate, getting an entirely accurate view of what is happening is hard. Most notably because pretty much all the stories we have of Jesus were finally transcribed much after his death, and anyone who has played the telephone game knows how that goes.

Sure, the Taliban is a bit of an extreme comparison, so here's one closer to the truth:

Protesting against government's excessive spending (while supporting extended tax cuts for the wealthy and 2 pointless wars) makes you a hypocrite.

Crying about freedom from big government (while working to limit the freedoms of people you don't agree with on a federal level) makes you a hypocrite.

The Tea Party is a bought-and-paid-for astro-turfing campaign to subvert actual conservatism with something else entirely. It's not grass-roots when your "movement" is paid for by the Koch brothers and Karl Rove. It's a farce, a joke.

How'd I do?

Semantics be damned, this is politics, the evolution of which (in the "parlance of our times") has produced an arena where anything may be said regardless of meaning in order to dupe, subvert, manipulate, lie, and destroy.

Romney and Obama are the same tools in the hands of their keepers. It would be exciting to watch both of their heads explode simultaneously on television as the result of their own gasses expanding too rapidly to be released

While I'm sure he's got plenty to fear from the U.S there is the issue of the allegations from the two women in Sweden.

Here's an interesting piece, updated to the 16/8/12 from a legal perspective. The final line might give you a taste of the contents;

[edit, here's the link!]
http://ffgqc.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/julian-the-asylum-seeker/

" If the Americans, the Swedes and the British are engaged in a sinister plot to deny him his rights, by subverting proper legal processes, then the founder of Wikileaks has a duty to tell us, in detail, what is going on and what is being done in our name."

@jmzero I'll assume you're referring to free-market capitalism, and that anybody who thinks capitalism is "divine perfection of fairness" is just a convenient characterization of those who don't happen to share your concerns.

What you've presented is an economic problem, a hypothetical one set in the future, but a problem nonetheless, and, of course, your concern that capitalism would deal with it poorly and unfairly.

Maybe you're right. Maybe society will be stumped by that problem when it comes.

Economic problems exist no matter what social system you adopt. Capitalism just happens to have a good track record of dealing with them, specially considering the limited amount of economic freedom (what I would consider the oxygen of capitalism) that it has enjoyed for centuries.

You portray those who are "winning" as people who quasi-religiously believe in capitalism, when I'd characterize them as mostly the opposite: corporatists and socialists bent on subverting capitalism for their own profit, depriving it of its oxygen. They've been very successful so far.

I'm not impressed with this at all. What Coke is doing is subverting a regulation intended to reduce litter (bottle deposits) in a way that produces more litter (plastic bags) while also finding yet another surface to plaster with their logo. And I am supposed to confuse that with environmentalism?

Satan doesn't care what you believe, as long as it isn't that Jesus Christ is the Lord.

>> ^messenger:
One of my favourite insights into the concepts of truth and Satan, one of the first that got me seriously thinking about the authenticity of the Bible, I heard from a rabbi on the radio. He said something like, "It may be that God wants us to discover his nature through investigating nature, and Satan created the Torah to throw us off track, or maybe God himself created the Torah as a test to see if we were smart enough to tell the difference. From a religious standpoint, it is a valid position to question the origin of scripture.">> ^probie:
S
hiny won't stop, you know. His "god" has commanded him to "spread his word" and convert as many people as possible. Even though this same god created these people tabula rasa, and instilled in them "free will" to make whatever choice they want, "He" still wants them to be followers. And all of this, while supposedly having the omnipotent power to do change anyone's paradigms, at any time. Psychotic.
What I laugh at the most is that science shows us how reality works, empirically, through observation and testing. It shows us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the truth about our universe and how it works. Sure we may not have all the answers yet, but I'll take the unknown over a blanket answer of "because" any day of the week. By disregarding science (and subsequently evolution), shiny and his ilk are attempting to subvert people from seeing and understanding the truth. Which is exactly what "Satan" wants.
Oh, the irony.

>> ^probie:

>> ^messenger:
Please stop. You know this argument and the whole "mousetrap" thing has been laid to rest already, right? Why do you keep bringing it up? It only demonstrates that you don't understand the concepts you're talking about. If your end goal is to convert people, that's fine with me, but you're losing credibility by citing bunk science.>> ^shinyblurry:
[embed]


Shiny won't stop, you know. His "god" has commanded him to "spread his word" and convert as many people as possible. Even though this same god created these people tabula rasa, and instilled in them "free will" to make whatever choice they want, "He" still wants them to be followers. And all of this, while supposedly having the omnipotent power to do change anyone's paradigms, at any time. Psychotic.
What I laugh at the most is that science shows us how reality works, empirically, through observation and testing. It shows us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the truth about our universe and how it works. Sure we may not have all the answers yet, but I'll take the unknown over a blanket answer of "because" any day of the week. By disregarding science (and subsequently evolution), shiny and his ilk are attempting to subvert people from seeing and understanding the truth. Which is exactly what "Satan" wants.
Oh, the irony.

One of my favourite insights into the concepts of truth and Satan, one of the first that got me seriously thinking about the authenticity of the Bible, I heard from a rabbi on the radio. He said something like, "It may be that God wants us to discover his nature through investigating nature, and Satan created the Torah to throw us off track, or maybe God himself created the Torah as a test to see if we were smart enough to tell the difference. From a religious standpoint, it is a valid position to question the origin of scripture.">> ^probie:
Shiny won't stop, you know. His "god" has commanded him to "spread his word" and convert as many people as possible. Even though this same god created these people tabula rasa, and instilled in them "free will" to make whatever choice they want, "He" still wants them to be followers. And all of this, while supposedly having the omnipotent power to do change anyone's paradigms, at any time. Psychotic.
What I laugh at the most is that science shows us how reality works, empirically, through observation and testing. It shows us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the truth about our universe and how it works. Sure we may not have all the answers yet, but I'll take the unknown over a blanket answer of "because" any day of the week. By disregarding science (and subsequently evolution), shiny and his ilk are attempting to subvert people from seeing and understanding the truth. Which is exactly what "Satan" wants.
Oh, the irony.