You need to watch her video again, because she most assuredly does not affirm, defend or apologize in any fashion for the Taliban. She states only that she wishes to appeal to them to stop. Asking them to stop suppressing and killing schoolgirls doesn't sound like sitting on the fence to me.

The Taliban leadership also reasserted their intentions to finish Malala off earlier this week. Probably very nearly the time this was recorded:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2013/10/taliban-renew-vow-attack-malala-2013107153959169272.html

Affirmative. It's *dead Jim.

@enoch

Well, note that the "governs best, governs least" quote IS Thoreau speaking, and although I think it's nonsense (I don't personally want to live completely outside any social structure, I don't think it's practical to separate myself from all of the advancements of society), I DO still think that Thoreau was a brave and noble person for believing in something and seeing that belief come to fruition. That's freedom.

But, when you're constantly putting down a system that you seem to wholeheartedly disagree with, but still support, that's hypocrisy, again, acc to me.

I brought up the issue of taxes because that's what Thoreau did. It's not terribly complicated. He felt that the system of government he was a part of was corrupt and restrictive, so he chose to not participate in it by not paying his taxes. He was jailed because of it, and when his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson bailed him out of jail he was upset. He WANTED to remain in jail because he didn't want to contribute to the social system he disagreed with so.

So when blankfist compared himself to Thoreau: http://videosift.com/talk/Gov-t-stopped-funding-charity-private-donations-surge-500#comment-1185054

I felt, and am reminded every time I see this type of propaganda, that there are a few ways of looking at this american libertarianism and those who follow it:

1) They don't believe in the government, but still support it through taxes.
2) They don't actually believe in the principles outlined in their own philosophy, and that's why they support what they affirm is a corrupt, freedom crushing, system, and that explains their support of it.
3) They believe in their ideas, but want to change things through the current system of government, which seems like a bit of a weird Catch 22.
or
4) They just want to have a theoretical discussion.

I've asked and asked, but he maintains that he's a freedom fighter who supports the government that he hates (through the payment of taxes, etc.)

There are other options I've probably considered along the way that aren't mentioned here, but I really put more thought into this than trying to tear blankfist down. It's genuinely confusing to me for someone to seemingly believe something so strongly and not act on those feelings.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. My first teaching job was in a very rural part of the US. Word got out quickly to the principal that I didn't say the pledge of allegiance in the morning (I have a variety of reasons for this, but the main one is that I am an atheist and don't agree with the phrase "under god"). I was brought into the principal's office after his stooge assistant "stopped by" my room several days in a row before and after the announcements. He wanted to know why I wasn't saying it and the conversation was respectful but went something like:

"Well, I choose not to, and I make sure everyone, including myself, is respectful during that time of the day, but I make it clear to the students that they don't have to as well."
"But don't you think you're setting a bad example for the students?"
"Well, no...? (at this point I knew they basically wanted me to just fall in)"

Long story short, at the end of the year, my job no longer existed. They moved the journalism teacher to another building and my position went from Eng teacher to Eng/Journalism teacher (I don't have a journalism license). Since I didn't have a license for that, I couldn't stay. :-/

It was hard to deal with, impossible to prove, but I'm better off 7 years into my career not being surrounded by those people anyway. They REALLY wanted me to just say the pledge, but it wasn't in my job description that I had to say the pledge every morning, and today, I'm happy to be in an inner city school with a more diverse and understanding population where I don't have to.

That's one BIG example from my life, and I'm no Thoreau, but neither is Blankfist. Now if he would just admit it.

Negatory. Claiming self defense flips the burden. We know that Martin is dead by Zimmerman's hand. The defense now has to prove they have a good reason to kill. Same thing with the insanity plea. Google Affirmative defense

I take it you are not familiar with the Oath of Office for the US government?

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

So when the government breaks it's oath, breaks faith to the people and demands of it's soldiers, those men and women who are ready to pay the ultimate price, that they commit atrocious crimes, what worth is there honouring your oath to them?

More importantly, Nuremberg proved that "just following orders" ie. adhering to your oath as a soldier, was not a defense. In the recent debacle in the Australian Defense Force, the chief of armies has explicitly said that people who received the illicit emails and deleted them rather than reporting would also be held responsible because they didn't blow the whistle...

You can waffle on about honour and adhering to ones oath, but the truth is you're advocating the path of the coward. Stay quiet, don't speak out, be a good little lap dog to the establishment. Allow evil to happen because you don't have the cojones to do anything about it. Take cold comfort in the fact that you "honoured" your oath.

I don't disagree about the snooping since 2001. As far as the koch brothers and the Tea Party, you don't know what the fuck your talking about.

They just want the Constitution follow or at least print current laws back towards it.

Instead of watching biased Democratic sucking media, go to an actual event .

They are not raciest, or the desire to go back to slavery as the media puts forth. . That's Bullshit. B.W.Y. the slavery shit and the KKK was the Democrat south doing its thing, not Republicans. MLK was Republican.


Today the Republican party is nothing more than a cheap intimation of the Democrat party. They will never win fighting that way. The Tea Party is they way to go.


FYI a little history ... Since you had a public education and hence only learned skewed left leaning revised history...


http://www.humanevents.com/2006/08/16/why-martin-luther-king-was-republican/

"
It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman’s issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act... And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican.

The Democrats were loosing the slavery battle and civil rights were breaking through and JFK/Johnson the

Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation’s fist goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans."


Democrats are still in the slavery business. They just use the welfare system to keep the poor poor and use the shallow promise of If you vote Democrat we will keep giving you a little cheese.

The Democrat party has been the most destructive political party to date.

There will come a day when we will need to take away affirmative action. But that day is obviously not today as this video completely demonstrates.

I agree with you, but what's the alternative? If we didn't do affirmative action, there wouldn't nearly as many minorities in higher positions as there is now. While we still have racial problems, they would be set back at least 20-30 years if we didn't give them a boost, artificial or not. There would always be exceptions of course, but minorities would still be in mostly service positions today. The idea of a minority being a CEO or getting elected into public office would still be an alien concept.

The sooner we treat them as equals, the sooner we level the playing field, the sooner Affirmative Action goes away, so quit bitching about first world problems and lets move forward so that Aff. Action IS unnecessary.

Affirmative action is discrimination. It is necessary, of course, to give an even playing field, but it's an evil in response to an evil. I am sad that we fail in this endeavor as a society--racial discrimination.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Not surprising. Anyone who thinks that discrimination is not still an issue, or that things like affirmative action aren't still needed - is fooling themselves.

Dawkins did not justify the scientific method in this clip. "It works" is an inductive argument (as Stephen Law affirms at :52) which faces the problem of induction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

It works the last time you checked, but why should it continue to work? To justify it you have to presuppose that the future will be like the past. What is the evidence that the future will be like the past? It's in the past, and thus the presupposition is based upon circular reasoning, a logical fallacy.

,,,different timbre...alright.

Selflinking is a bannable offense on this site. Posting/self promoting a video that you posted elsewhere is not allowed.

As you have posted this video on multiple sites one may well assume that was your intent.

However, if you were indeed unaware and wish to contribute to the site by otherwise posting, I encourage you to appeal the banning and affirm your intention. The powers that be here are generally evenhanded.

Then...post well and often and self link no more.

Well, you mention the unborn, yet on the main the thinking in environmental circles is that we have too many humans and that the Earth is unable to support them. Therefore, abortion (over 70 million unborn children murdered in the US since the 70s) is to be embraced, and even more extreme methods of population control are not only openly pondered, but have resulted in mass sterilization programs which have been mercilessly implemented in third world countries. Here are some of the greater atrocities committed in the name of preserving "mother earth":

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-population-control-holocaust

Among the intellectual elite, human lives are reduced to being paid the same consideration as one might the lowly cockroach. Contrary to your assertion, it is the Christian who affirms the sanctity of life and the inherent value of every person, whereas it is the opponents of Christianity that affirm infanticide:

Dawkins approves of infanticide

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFWt9cj3uj4

If you would reread my prior comment, you will see that I am in agreement with @RFlagg that we should be good stewards of the Earth. However, the mania of the environmentalists is to devalue human life and subordinate it to their misguided notions of preservation. The sickness of this world is sin, and the only one who can cure it is God. This world will continue to degenerate until the Lord returns because it is in rebellion against its Creator:

2 Chronicles 7:14

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

^^ Thanks for sharing your Dimty reflections, nothing quite like standing in that temple-Did you ever talk to the entities that reside in that space? There's an intelligence there that's not an wholly subjective, associative conjuring of the mind-I know it's a consciousness outside of oneself, maybe a higher self-It's sentient and outside of the realm of any other psychoactive subs I have ever taken.

My first DMT trip I flew through a huge, smiley-face grid (I think I had just seen the Watchmen) before I reached something I did not recognize from all my flight time till then.......Great stuff...Life-affirming and purgative and, you can do it on your LUNCH HOUR!!

Count me in with an affirmative assessment.

I thought it was kinda funny. It was an argument between a professional fundamentalist trained-from-birth debater and a six-year-old, so nothing really came out of it, though it is funny to note that this kid fared better than Theramintrees against Hovind's "truth" argument.

The argument itself is invalid because it oddly requires the other person to agree with the conclusion before being able to make any affirmative statements against it. It's the "because God" argument again.