Let's not forget.....
“I’ve got this thing and it’s f—ing golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f—-in’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”— Nov. 5, 2008, in a conversation secretly recorded on FBI wiretap about Obama’s Senate seat.
Not exactly the type of political fundraising that was considered ordinary (or legal) in the days before Trump...selling vacant Senate seats to the highest bidder....and certainly not what Mandela was in prison for. I hope he got a few more things that were f-ing golden in prison.

Lol. You're funny.
Ok, in your world, MLK, Ghandi, and Mandela were successful against tyrannical governments because their causes were backed by armed militants and their movements used threats of force not peaceful protests while clearly denouncing violence.
I don't live in that world. What color is the sky there? Do you celebrate MalcomX day there instead of MLK day?

Yeah...we're discussing America today.....but you must go back to when mechanical warfare didn't exist and the military used flintlocks to make an argument that your AK might make a difference against the military. *facepalm

You clearly aren't being rational. Good day.

On the chance your 'jokingly' isn't obvious, MLK, Ghandi and Mandela's causes ALL had support from those willing to use violence, aka better weapons would help.

Malcolm X would be the next most prominent figure beside MLK. Indian independence wasn't won with peaceful hunger strikes alone, and again lots of violence in South Africa.

Ghandi even bridged the gap to working alongside the effective army fighting for India's independence:
" I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.
But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment, forgiveness adorns a soldier."

Speaking more to the point of America today, pretty much no civil war has been fought exclusively with civilians on one side, and the government, police, army and all other branches of the state united on the other. The reason being that if that kind of unity within the government against the civilian population exists, you ALREADY have tyranny.

In America, the example would be if a president or a particular political party decided to try for tyrannical over reach, would the American public be better equipped to resist that with or without guns? In civil war, guns give power to the majority of public opinion that would need to be there otherwise. In a nation with an unarmed public, whatever the majority of soldiers side with is likely gonna win. With an armed populace, the civilian opinion matters more.

I think it's an overall modest observation, and one that really doesn't in anyway make it obvious that the modest benefit is worth the costs. That is another matter, but you can't factually claim that there isn't a meaningful difference between an armed and unarmed population when facing civil war.

True, but retaliation won't fix the issues they have. It definitely is something Mandela would have said is extremely counter-productive.

Thanks for referring me here, @eric3579.

It's all true. The bit about pretty much zero world history being taught in schools is correct, but in a way that just makes it all the MORE puzzling.

I teach high school level students English. I do a unit on "Local Heroes" where my students learn a little bit about significant people from native English speaking countries. To get the theme across, I start with a Thai guy named Phraya Phichai who is a very significant person in the province where I live. From there I talk about Elvis Presley or Amelia Earhart for the US, Lord Nelson for England, William Wallace for Scotland, Nelson Mandela for South Africa, etc. to demonstrate people who have a similar kind of significance to people from those states/countries.

After that unit, during oral testing I ask every student to name their favorite historical figure / hero other than the ones we covered. Single most common response: the King of Thailand (the one that just died last year was and still is extremely respected / revered by Thais). But the second most common response: Hitler. By a pretty wide margin. I'd say 30%+ say the King, and nearly 10% say Hitler. Random sports players, musicians, etc. make up most of the rest -- but none with a big chunk of the responses like those 2.

I used to be pretty shocked by all of that kind of stuff here (I've seen the shirts, chicken restaurant, nazi flags for sale, etc.) but I guess I'm pretty numb to it by now. No idea what the source of it is, because it really does seem quite strange that Hitler isn't covered in schools here, yet somehow people seem to learn broad strokes about him enough for him to be oddly "popular". Whatever the source of that is, it seems to filter out the stuff that should make him infamous as opposed to a general pop culture sort of famous.

I thought Zuma was at last finally losing Mandela's ANC base? I was there last year and he was all over the TV getting screwed in parliament, & have a friend in London who is very excited about the DA making progress.

It took me months to get over the first revelation of this whole "Mandela" thing. I'm just more unnerved that so many others have the same memory.

To answer my own question, it was probably Jean Beliveau that he was talking about. But the event was for Mandela so I don't know why there was a mixup.

@lucky760

Showing compassion is a choice. I don't doubt for a second that a majority of people in the world agree with your viewpoint the guy in the video doesn't deserve to be shown compassion because a) he was engaging in a crime and b) his injuries are a direct result of the actions he took.

And that's specifically why I responded to your post and the point I've been trying to make throughout this conversation: choosing not to have compassion for fellow human beings--making arbitrary decisions about who deserves and does not deserve compassion--leads exactly to the kind of mess you now see in Gaza, Syria, the Ukraine, and the U.S. prison system (John Oliver's vid explains clearly that the situation has gotten so bad because it's easy for people not to care about convicted criminals).

Yes, you are right about the Gaza vid--the Israelis want revenge. They want revenge because they no longer look at Gazans as humans worthy of compassion but as "the other," an enemy that must be conquered. Again, arbitrarily choosing who to have and not to have compassion for gives us exactly the world we have now--a world where people can cheer the bombing of civilians.

Ghandi once said be the change in the world you want to see--and followed through in a way that changed not just India's future but that of the world (with his effect on the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., on Mandela's movement to abolish apartheid in South African, etc.). I have no idea how you imagined up I was proposing compassion re-education camps. I'm simply pointing out to you and anyone else who cares to read that you have a choice. You can choose to believe and act the same as we as a species always have (and get in return the world we currently have) or you can choose to try to move beyond our genetic and environmental predispositions and work towards a potentially better world.

Then again, you've already said you'd call an ambulance and run over to help the guy in the vid if you saw this happen, so I think it's safe to say you do feel some compassion for the guy even if you think what he did was stupid and irresponsible. Your initial posts made it sound like you didn't care at all, which is partly what led me to respond because frankly I didn't really believe that--and I'm glad I was right about that at least even if I'm completely wrong about humanity as you suggest.

Mr. Mandela wasn't as nice as people like to think.

Not saying he was evil. Just... I don't know... sanitized?

Gandhi might have had a fundamental problem with Mandela considering his stance on black folks in general-

Molyneux tries to take down Gandhi, like he tried to take down Mandela a few days after he died. Here, he gets into some interesting topics (and others not so interesting), like this premise that Gandhi supposedly didn't base his ethics on logical reasoning. This appears to have some truth to it since much of Gandhi's thinking was of a different kind than what most had seen at the time.

In this article, however, Molyneux is himself found to be falling short of his rationalist aspirations. The author, David Gordon, knows (as did Gandhi) the difficulty -- indeed the impossibility -- of coming up with a 100% rationalist basis for morality/ethics.

If nothing else, the axioms upon which the ethics are based will necessarily be irrational -- not anti-reason -- but outside of reason.

Your video, ... Interpreter Translates Mandela Memorial Imposter's Signs, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Also, it needs to be said, that although the S.African interpreter is probably completely faking it, sign language is actually different from country to country, just like speaking/writing language, so a reall S.A interpreter might not make sense to a US interpreter either. (Not saying the guy at the Mandela ceremony is real, but a real translater might be nonsensical to the rest of the worlds hearing impaired as well..)