I'm confused on why the religious right want to deny equal rights to people. Even if it is a sin, it doesn't effect anyone but themselves. Jesus spent His whole time hanging with sinners and ministering to them. He wouldn't be arguing against them having equal rights under the law just because they sin differently than others. He taught again and again that Love was the greatest Commandment, that being all self righteous and showing how holy you are was bad. Modern Christianity has turned from love to a denial of equal rights under the law based on people sinning differently than they do. Let they without sin cast the first stone... and yet they cast their stones in the form of votes and denying products/services with their business and so on because they don't like the sin, as if they are so holy and sin free theme selves. Not only did Jesus say let those without sin cast the first stone, He Himself, with out sin didn't cast any stones. These holy crusaders ask, "What Would Jesus Do" but then ignore what He'd actually do... Why this obsession over people sinning differently than they do? If that sin doesn't hurt anyone else directly, then who cares? If God wants to convict them of their sin, then let Him do it, not us... it's almost as if the Christian Right don't think God is doing enough convicting and are trying to do it themselves, as if God isn't strong enough to do it, or it upsets them so much they don't want to let go and let God...

And why does Sodom get the rap for gay stuff and sodomy? The Bible specifically says the sin of Sodom was being a land of plenty without enough concern for the needy and the poor (basically full of Republicans). "'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy." - NIV. "This is what your sister Sodom has done wrong. She and her daughters were proud that they had plenty of food and had peace and security. They didn't help the poor and the needy." - God's Word... all versions equal to the same basic thing... People blame the gays on correlative texts, mostly relating to what happened to the angels when they arrived to rescue Lot's family... where Lot offered his betrothed daughters to be raped instead (which by Biblical law meant they'd have to be stoned to death as well as their rapist, though one could perhaps argue that Deuteronomy 22:23-24 comes after the story of Sodom so that law might not yet have applied). Anyhow, the Bible speaks that the Sin of Sodom was not helping the needy and the poor... why God, who knows every single secret thought you have ever had or ever will have before you were even formed in the womb (before the foundations of the world were even formed) and yet needs angels to see if there are good people???

And a million and one more rants...

Oil crusades in the middle east, and fat envelopes for Wall Street thieves won't pay for themselves. You people will have to make do.

"teaches right behavior"....
Do you mean like owning slaves, murdering infidels and heretics, raping women, crusading, inquisitioning, conquesting, etc.... Yeah, great book of morality, and wonderful moral behavior exhibited by it's believers...not.

It's only because people fail to follow the religious ideas wholly that religion is tolerated at all. If people acted like the fanatical Muslims, taking every word as law and acting on it, Christianity would have been outlawed in the US at the inception of the country (indeed, many of the founding fathers seemed to want this, at least in part). The 3 major western religions all require 'holy war' to spread the belief system if read honestly.

What he said is that only psychotics need religion to restrain them from immorality. If you aren't psychotic, religion harms you more than helps you.

Any catholic hospital would qualify as one opened by psychotics, since one of their 10 important rules is "no statues of anything", yet they do nothing but worship statues and icons. They institutionally ignore any 'rule' that's inconvenient, and insist on absolute adherence to any that further their current goals, which may change 180 deg tomorrow. Sure sounds psychotic to me.

in an anarchal society the corporation could not and would not exist.they would go back to being temporary business alliances in order to complete an assigned project and then disbursed.

Who tells Enron or Blackwater they have to disburse? Who enforces this?

in an anarchal society,if a company wanted to move its plant over-seas and would leave thousands un-employed,effectively destroying that community.they would first have to seek permission from that township and/or sell the plant to the town in order to change base of operations.

Again, what's stopping them? In fact, what stops a company from cutting down a massive forest or polluting a river?

in an anarchal system,there would be no war on drugs.no criminalizing the poor.no war on terror or wars of aggression.

Maybe, but it would simply be replaced by something even worse.

look,the argument is always,and i mean always:power vs powerlessness.

anarchy is about power to the people in its purest form.
and i hold zero illusions that it may be remotely perfect but if i have to choose..i will always choose YOU over some wealthy elite power broker.

And that's why I believe in a representative democracy. To me there are only a few ways the world can work:
- there's what I would call historical anarchy, where there was nothing to stop groups of the powerful banding together to oppress the weak. This has been the default position for most of human history.
- there's small scale communal anarchy, where people live in small communities. It's possible for this to work, but some bright spark usually figures out that these people are easy pickings for oppression (see above). Even if that doesn't happen, it's incredibly limiting. All of our greatest achievements only happen with cooperation on a large scale. If we're ever to get off this rock and see what's out there, it's not going to happen with hippie communes.
- representative democracy. It's ugly, inefficient, susceptible to corruption, open to pointless "moral crusades" and can be heartless and bureaucratic. And it's still the best system we have....

Churchill really wasn't kidding when he said "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others"

Check out some of thunderf00ts videos on sarkeesian (youtube thunderf00t sarkesian).

Level headed response and breaks down this social crusader for what she really is.

Someone thats making noises to get money for her videos / books whatever. She sounds reasonable, until you hear the other side....and then you cant fathom how you could have ever believed her bullshit to begin with.

@VoodooV: "Every one of these youtube crusaders are comfortably enjoying the perks of a system they despise."

What perks? Like roads and firemen? You know, it's not like we couldn't have those things without government. And those kinds of services are only a small portion of the federal budget. In fact, from all the excise taxes collected on gasoline, tobacco and alcohol, they'd cover the roads completely, which costs around $60 billion annually. In fact, things like the EPA, Dept. of Trans, NASA, Dept. of Edu, all cost less than the revenue the federal government categorizes as "other." Look it up: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals

So what about all the wars and militarism? Is that, too, a perk? And the prison industrial complex that locks up 1% of our population? What are these perks you speak of?

Even Ayn Rand took gov't assistance.

I love it when statists bring this up. I personally am not an Objectivist, and find lots of flaws with their ideology, but this is a cheap blow. Obviously it shows the economic illiteracy of most statists. For one, she's forced to pay into social security, so therefore why shouldn't she receive some of it back? And second, if you spend more than a couple seconds reading about U.S. monetary policy, you'd know that the purchasing power of the dollar is reduced over time due to inflation, and hence savings are always impacted. This should alarm you instead of excite you.

The whole thing is infested with logical fallacies: false equivalencies, ad homs, strawmen, and even a no true scotsman thrown in for shits and giggles.

By all means don't take any time to point out which things he said were these things. No, that'd be helpful, and we wouldn't want to cloudy any appeals to emotion with pesky things like fact and well thought out rebuttals.

they spend all this time criticizing the problems of gov't and NEVER ONCE demonstrate how it would work without these systems.

I think there are plenty who do. It's just that statists don't accept those answers, or any answers that don't emulate the current status quo systems they're accustomed to. I'm not interested in replacing public schools with another bureaucracy.

Gov't is demonstrably false? Last I checked, there are a lot of independently verified gov'ts out there. LOL!

You know what is demonstrably false? Anarchists independent from the gov't they claim to hate. Every one of these youtube crusaders are comfortably enjoying the perks of a system they despise.

You want to impress me? Go find an island somewhere and show us how awesome non-statism is.

Even Ayn Rand took gov't assistance.

At what point will 'white privilege' be considered over? How many years / decades / centuries must pass? How many affirmative action programs / laws must be enacted to consider all races/ women on equal footing?
When sentencing certain individuals in our Canadian courts here, judges here are required to take their ancestry into consideration.
Here in Canada, there's also a big move afoot for governments to apologize for historical injustices -- Japanese, Chinese, Sikhs, natives, Jews, etc.
My problem is that we are looking at history through a modern lens which is crazy. How far back are we going to go? 50 years? 100 years? A millennia? Should Christians today should apologize for the Crusades?
PS. Before somebody accuses me of a hidden agenda, I have no axe to grind. I am part native but don't make a big deal of it. I certainly don't look at a white guy and think, "Hey that guy owes ME something because of what his great-great-great-grandfather did."
I think Bill is right... at some point people have to stop leaning on laws and affirmative action movements as a crutch/excuse and get on with working things out for themselves.

I never said that we should brand people living in Islamic regions as the same. Stop putting words in my mouth. I said that if you seriously follow the tenets of the Islamic religion, not casually but seriously follow what the religion says, then you will be doing whatever you can to further the spread of Islam and Sharia law.

This is somewhat of a problem in all religions, but IT IS PREDOMINANT in Islam because Islam has never stepped away from these rules and tenets. In a very sad way, Islam is still in the state Christianity was during the damn inquisition and crusades. Now you will have people that refuse to devote themselves fully to Islam and those people will not act in a fashion like I illustrated. They are truly casual worshipers that have found a way to morally work around the tenets of the religion. I have no problem with those folks. Sadly, a huge amount of evidence points towards the information that they are a minority of the religion.

As far as US involvement, I said that we do stick our nose where it doesn't belong and that we should cut the rest of the world off when it comes to requests for military aid. But lets look at the link you posted. I see about half or more of the incidents are the US providing help at the request of other countries or joining coalitions of other countries. You can't have it both ways, either ask us to back out of the world scene completely or get over it when we do get involved at your request. Do you think we just popped up and sent troops/missiles to Turkey because we wanted to? Or did we invade Jordan while sending troops to help prevent the Syrian Civil War from spilling over into their country? They ASKED us to come and help. Are drone strikes against terrorists stupid? Absolutely and they help the terrorists find new recruits, but does that make Islam any less of a violence promoting religion?

The answer is no, it does not. Nor does your attempt to veer the spotlight off of the failings of Islam and back onto something else. You can misdirect all you like, but until you can provide hard facts you are simply equivocating.

Islam promotes Sharia law. Tell me truthfully if you can, that a religion that supports the execution of a woman who left the faith to marry a man her family didn't receive a dowry from is a religion of peace. Tell me that a religion that supports the execution of Homosexuals is a religion of peace. Tell me that a religion that still promotes honor killing is a religion of peace.

Because if that is the case, by your own definition the US is the greatest supporter of peace since the Romans.

You are confusing me with others you are 'debating'.
I have always thought that the Union went to war to preserve the union...they did not go on a crusade to eradicate slavery. I'm not sure anyone here has ever made that claim.
And yes, the north sent in the army because the south attacked federal forts and took federal property.
Not sure what you're saying here, you now seem to admit that Lincoln tried compensated emancipation before joining the war, only to be rebuffed by the states...I'm not sure where you get the idea it was only tried in Delaware.
And yes, that's how government works, the federal reps and the 'local' reps hash out the laws...in this case the locals said 'not now, and on our terms if and when' to compensated emancipation, and the federal reps had little backing besides Lincoln.
As I see it, Americans did all of those tactics employed by the British etc. Perhaps the federal government didn't try them all, but Americans did.
Contradictory sentiment, false implication, and simple ridiculousness in the 'charitable' paragraph. "Get one over on the south"? Hmmmm.
When a violent insurrection starts, the present government will nearly always engage in kind.
Peaceful secession may have worked...too bad the south had to get violent first.
Again, to you, are you saying it was all about slavery, or about preserving the union? You seem to flip flop there.
Again you intentionally miss-state the obvious, not when faced with a problem, but when faced with an ATTACK. He didn't go to war with Mary Todd Lincoln, and she was certainly a problem!

Delaware is considered a northern state. Maybe not by you but by others.
And when I lived in Maryland, everyone there seemed to consider it a northern state too. But ok, you don't consider it a northern state. Cool.
(Ask anyone in Boston if he is a "Yankee" and see how that goes!)

But what's your point now? You agree that the Civil War was a "War to preserve the Union, not a Lincoln crusade to end slavery". That's why he did not invade or interfere with the border states. They did not secede. So how is this relevant to the original point about Jon Stewart thinking otherwise and going off on Andrew Napolitano about it? And are you now trying to claim that the north was acting in "self-defense" because of southern attacks on federal forts?


"In 1862, the General Assembly replied to Lincoln's compensated emancipation offer with a resolution stating that, "when the people of Delaware desire to abolish slavery within her borders, they will do so in their own way, having due regard to strict equity." And they furthermore notified the administration that they regarded "any interference from without" as "improper," and a thing to be "harshly repelled.""

The proposal was never put to a vote. It was not tried in other states. And it was not addressed directly to the slave owners but to politicians in the Assembly. No effort was put into it.

Among the tactics employed by the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danes, and others were slave rebellions, abolitionist campaigns to gain public support for emancipation, election of anti-slavery politicians, encouragement and assistance of runaway slaves, raising private funds to purchase the freedom of slaves, and the use of tax dollars to buy the freedom of slaves.

The most charitable thing I could say is that Lincoln tried but failed to come up with and implement any other way to end slavery but to engage in 'bloodshed and violence' (putting aside that he claimed to not care to end slavery except as a way to get one over on the South).

Still, that only says something about his competency, his "political genius" as some say (or lack of it), but not about whether there were other options available that could have worked without the 620,000 dead and 800,000+ more maimed-or-disfigured-for-life.

Of course, there is no empirical way to 'prove' or 'disprove' that any more than there is any empirical way to 'prove' or 'disprove' that, without two nukes, Japan would have lost the war, or that without the Korean war, the Communists would have taken over the world, or that without the Iraq invasion, Saddam would not have built "weapons of mass destruction" to unleash on the world.

What if 'peaceful secession' would have neutered the federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act (which Lincoln strongly supported), creating a flood of runaway slaves that could not have been stopped and would have broken the back of the slave system'?

The Soviet Union collapsed on its own without the US and its allies going into a bloody war against it. Maybe if the US had started a third world war with the USSR, it would have collapsed sooner. But it certainly would not have been worth the 'blood and violence'. And it is far from certain that the 5 years of Civil War accelerated the end of slavery, while it has certainly served to bolster and continue the decades of segregation, discrimination, and abuse that followed.

The first Republican president seems to have set a precedent for later Republican neocons. When faced with a problem ---> go to war.

1. But the war was was not 'necessary' to end slavery (as Jon Stewart, Larry Wilmore and some who posted here and many others claim). There were other options to end slavery.
2. It was a "War to preserve the Union, not a Lincoln crusade to end slavery".

Those two statements are not contradictory statements. Get it?

I only ask this of those who insist that Lincoln went to war to "free the slaves" (which is what Stewart and Wilmore suggest in the video). Obviously if you dismiss that as nonsense, then sure, the answer is obvious, because he didn't care to, he just wanted to preserve the union. So, where's the contradiction?


"War to preserve the Union, not a Lincoln crusade to end slavery."

Again, I understand what you are saying, I only mention the freeing of the slaves for those (like Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore apparently) who insist that the war was about "freeing the slaves."

Tom Woods would agree with this. In fact, he's written about it: that the Civil War was a "War to preserve the Union, not a Lincoln crusade to end slavery."

You obviously haven't read him.

Judge Andrew Napolitano, Tom Woods, Ron Paul, and many libertarians agree that it was (in your own words) a "War to preserve the Union, not a Lincoln crusade to end slavery". Get it? There is no disagreement there. Get it?

The issue of buying the slaves' freedom is only for those who say that the war was "necessary" to free the slaves. But it was not and it was not the main reason the war was fought. Get it?

So, about this you are in fact in agreement with Tom Woods and Andrew Napolitano and you are in disagreement with Jon Stewart. Get it?

And Just to be perfectly clear, secession predated the Lincoln administration! To ask, why didn't he do this or that is to ignore the situation he faced before he was even sworn in.

"On December 20, 1860, shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860, South Carolina adopted an ordinance declaring its secession from the United States of America."

War to preserve the Union, not a Lincoln crusade to end slavery. Get it?

This is what happens when you get your history from political pundits like Thomas Wood Jr.

Try reading a real historical text on the period.

I recommend "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson.

Hey look, I guess I'm a free university!

I don't get your point.

The talking meat bag on Fox news is an idiot because he made the argument that Lincoln somehow started the Civil War to end slavery, thereby starting his further bullshit point that there were better ways to do this.

You acknowledge this in your first post when pointing out that Lincoln didn't start the Civil War to end slavery, but to preserve the union.

I'll go further than that and point out that he didn't even start the war at all.

Southern states entered a state of open rebellion, stole federal property and munitions and then fired on a federal garrison. Lincoln never embarked on some idealistic crusade, he put down a rebellion and restored the country.

The south rebelled out of a perceived threat his presidency posed to the institution of slavery since Lincoln's opinions on the matter were well known, but he never proposed ANY policy against the south, he never had a chance to. They were in open rebellion before he even reached the capitol.

So what are you exactly saying?

That slavery would have just ended on it's own? Yea, I guess maybe. Who knows. But any point saying this was some kind of option to Lincoln clearly misses what the opening choices of his presidency were all about.