The Anti-Democrat bear illustrates common claims made by a segment of Tea Party "Activists."
Not all members but some.

It's those individuals who are the focus of this video because it's those Tea Party Members who claim that illegal aliens and the poor make government too big.

Considering:
1. The majority of illegal aliens = Mexican people.
2. The majority of poor = Black people.
3. The majority of the Tea Party = older white males.
4. The majority of Government = Rich older white males.

There is no way have an honest discussion about those four issues without mentioning the groups they impact.. which are clearly divided along racial lines.

Will some unscrupulous individuals use this point to make broad generalizations about all Neo Cons/Tea Party Members/Libertarians? Sure.

Tho you yourself seem even more desperate for attempting to delegitimize an entire ideology by claiming that factors like race or sex or age or income level are non-issues.

p.s. - what's the difference between Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush

>> ^quantumushroom:

Some of these points might be worth refuting...until 3:13.
Do leftists know they sound like desperate, desperate fools when they bring RACE into arguments about the legitimate size and purposes of government?
Obviously not.

P.S. "Mild disappointment" with obama = "nicked while shaving" with guillotine

Some of these points might be worth refuting...until 3:13.

Do leftists know they sound like desperate, desperate fools when they bring RACE into arguments about the legitimate size and purposes of government?

Obviously not.


P.S. "Mild disappointment" with obama = "nicked while shaving" with guillotine

OMG He stole a bottled beverage after he quit!?! PREPARE THE GUILLOTINE!! An example must be made! No quitting for ridiculous and insulting work conditions! No stealing from airlines! No endangering your fellow man and neighbour (by sliding down slides!)! NO GOLDEN PARACHUTE (or alternatively fun escape) FOR YOU! Who does he think he is? A wall street exec?

@GenjiKilpatrick No I don't like the UFC because they have so many rules which benefits ground fighters. As I stated. Please don't put words in my mouth. If I disliked them because I felt that people should be allowed to paralyse each other I would have written that, as in "I don't like the UFC because they don't allow fighters to paralyse each other.", I did not. (Well, until I wrote that example.)

Although the fights would be a lot shorter if they did (People doing the guillotine would go for snap and not tap.)

Also broken bones happen from time to time when you fight whether it is allowed or not. The latest I can recall is the fight between Lidell and Franklin where a standing kick broke Franklin's arm but he kept on fighting anyway. Another example would be a former club mate (not former due to events described here) of mine who broke his arm in the first round of a WTF Taekwondo fight from blocking a kick and he fought the rest of the match with a broken arm.

@ghark Nope, no trolls here. I even checked under the sofa

@ToKeyMonsTeR Thank you. The problem is that MMA has become a style so every single fighter fights exactly the same way, using the same 10 techniques that everybody else does. This goes against the intent of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) IMO as no one is mixing anything anymore. Heck there are gyms who teach the style MMA which is ridiculous.

@Ryjkyj Thanks and see comment to ToKeyMonsTer

@Contrarian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-ownership either you agree to it or you don't.

@rottenseed Thanks for the link! It was an interesting read and he makes some valid points in there.

To all a good night/morning/midday/whatever it might be at your location!

Date: April 27th, 2010

The Forgotten Man

By Robert Ringer

Why have the combined mudslinging voices of the media (so called), Congressional Democrats, and the thin-skinned boy wonder who occupies the Oval Office not been able to turn the tide against the tea partiers? If you look at the poll numbers, the answer is obvious: Most Americans are tea partiers.

However, most of them are not yet in enough pain to skip a day at the ball park and stand in a crowd of thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) and listen to tea-party speakers. That’s a shame, but it doesn’t change the fact that they identify with the tea-party movement.

So, what is the common bond with which they identify? Taxes? Healthcare? Financial regulation? I thought about this question as I was rereading Amity Shlaes’ landmark book, The Forgotten Man. In it, she quotes Yale philosopher William Graham Sumner, who, clear back in 1883, explained the crux of the moral problem with progressivism as follows:

”As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine … what A, B, and C shall do for X.”

Shlaes goes on to add: ”But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, ‘the man who never is thought of.”’

In other words, C is the guy who isn’t bothering anyone, but is forced to supply the funds to help the X’s of the world, those whom power holders unilaterally decide have been treated unfairly and must be compensated.

FDR, however, did a switcheroo on Sumner’s point by removing the moniker of ”the forgotten man” from C and giving it to X – ”the poor man, the old man, labor, or any other recipient of government help.” Very clever … very Obamanistic. As I recall, FDR originally used the phrase the forgotten man to refer to the victims of the dust bowl in the 1930s. Zap! Just like that, Sumner’s forgotten man was transformed into the opposite of what he was meant to be.

Today, I believe it is the tea-party people who represent Sumner’s Forgotten Man. They are taxed and told what they must do and what they must give up in the way of freedom and personal wealth every time a new law is passed. I believe it is this reality that bonds the tea-party people together.

Put another way, it is not healthcare or any other single issue the tea-party people are most angry about. It is all of the issues combined that have to do with impinging on their individual liberty. Above all, they are outraged by the fact that immoral politicians and bureaucrats not only violate their God-given right to live their lives as they please, they dismiss them as ”extremists.” Collectively, the tea-party people are today’s Forgotten Man.

In his essay (http://mises.org/books/forgottenman.pdf), Sumner went on to say:

”All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. It is true that, until this time, the proletariat, the mass of mankind, have rarely had the power and they have not made such a record as kings and nobles and priests have made of the abuses they would perpetrate against their fellow-men when they could and dared.

”But what folly it is to think that vice and passion are limited by classes, that liberty consists only in taking power away from nobles and priests and giving it to artisans and peasants and that these latter will never abuse it! They will abuse it just as all others have done unless they are put under checks and guarantees, and there can be no civil liberty anywhere unless rights are guaranteed against all abuses, as well from proletarians as from generals, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics.”

Sumner was a man of great insight. He saw the absurdity of assuming that the poor man is morally superior to the rich man. This is where I believe that sincere revolutionaries go wrong. While their initial intentions (to help ”the poor”) may, at least in their own minds, be well-meant, they begin with a false premise (that the misfortunes of those at the bottom of the economic ladder are a result of the evil actions of those who are more successful) and, from there, leap from one false conclusion to another.

Which is why politicians who pose as conservatives to get elected so often take the Mush McCain-Lindsey Graham-Charlie Crist route and continually rush to the aid of their progressive Democratic pals. I believe that these philosophically lost souls do the bidding of the intimidating left because they have never given any serious thought to the possibility that the very premise of progressivism is morally wrong.

As a result, they have no feeling for the (perceived) rich man. In plotting their do-gooder schemes, he is easy to forget. They see nothing whatsoever wrong with society’s sacrificing his liberty for the ”public good.” Bring out the guillotine! As Montaigne said, ”Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.”

What gave birth to the tea parties is that the Forgotten Man syndrome is like a metastasizing disease. As politicians long ago realized, there aren’t enough rich people to support all of the X’s. As the number of X’s (i.e., those who live off the surpluses of others) increases, a lot of A’s and B’s must, by necessity, be reclassified as C’s. And that is when they become candidates for joining the tea-party movement.

Put simply: When A’s and B’s are transformed into C’s, they mysteriously lose their enthusiasm for new laws to help out X. Put even more simply, they suddenly realize that they are now the Forgotten Man. And that realization is what automatically qualifies them as tea-party people. No recruitment necessary, thank you.

I see they've let you out of the asylum again.

>> ^imstellar28:

The Age of Enlightenment you mean? History is a snarky mistress. Guillotines brought democracy to the French, maybe its time for guillotines to end it for the Americans?
>> ^gwiz665:
Degenerating into the dark ages.

The Age of Enlightenment you mean? History is a snarky mistress. Guillotines brought democracy to the French, maybe its time for guillotines to end it for the Americans?
>> ^gwiz665:

Degenerating into the dark ages.

I loved this video as it is first hand account of what many consider to be common knowledge. It also shows that the lowly employee at the bottom sometimes have more business sense than the people at the top. Her helping people pay off their debt is a great long-term strategy for the company. Them wanting to keep the people least likely to be able to pay saddled with the most debt is extremely short term thinking as the company is increasing the likeleyhood that those loans will ever get paid at all. While it looks good on their current spreadsheet because they are owed more money and at a high interest in the long term they will have to write off much of that when the loans fail. Bosses at the top probably care more about keeping the poor down than collecting more money since they already have plenty for themselves and many generations of their families to come. Meanwhile the customers and most shareholders suffer in the long term... until the people at the top find themselves under the guillotine of course (sad inevitability unless the people at the top mend their ways)

-Karl

^ Speaking for liberals, I've got to say that I find the libertarian argument so amusingly backwards.

Essentially the argument goes something like this:

Corporations always make money via the most efficient path.

Using government to distort the market to their favor is more cost-effective than actually being a good business.

Therefore, government will always be corrupted by companies so long as it has the power to distort the market, at the cost of freedom.

Therefore, government must be destroyed, and everything will be free and happy.

That seems like trying to cure head lice with a guillotine.

If there are areas where gangs are raping, murdering, and stealing with impunity because they've paid off the cops, someone who wants to improve the situation will:

A) Permanently cease law enforcement in the area

B) Replace the cops with people who will keep their oaths to the public

Why does anyone think A is the right answer when it's about corporations committing bribery?

I see hope in small ways and I see the desperation of the people trying to control the masses. Ie. the "leave it there" segment of the daily show recently. It ends with the gov't bullshitter telling the host when they should end the segment causing a momentary confusion. I see more and more of these "gaffes" as the rulers are loosing their previous careful tiptoe to 1984 style. I see hope in the constant lawsuits against police forces in various cities. I hope that I don't live to see a violent revolution but it is not far off. The rich few who would seek to rule by fear, conformity and complacency seem to be stupid enough to not give up before they are killed at the guillotine which makes me very sad since I have so much love for everyone even the horribly misguided ones.
-Karl

There's a difference between reverence for a martyr by wearing a crucifix and mockery of him. Based on your explanation of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, I believe that you have a limited understanding of the doctrine of the Atonement. I agree that many people's definition of Christianity is absurd, but I am annoyed by people who don't really understand the gospel as it was taught by Jesus Christ, and yet they feel entitled to look down upon and mock believers.

In reply to this comment by hpqp:
In reply to this comment by thepinky:
You're all so eager to mock Christianity that I think you failed to notice how perverse this is. I wonder what's funny about a crucifixion machine. Considering the hundreds of thousands of people that were brutally and indiscriminately murdered in that way, both in the ancient and modern world, a crucifixion machine is about as funny as gas chambers and guillotines. At least gas chambers and guillotines are quick, whereas crucifixion is prolonged torture. Yeah. Hilarious.

Crucifixion was horrible torture, true. So: how many people have you seen lately wearing mini guillotines around the necks, or praying in front of mock gas chambers? How many people do you know, on the other hand, who worship an omniscient god who sent his son/self to get brutally tortured and murdered as a scapegoat for his believers?
Despite christianity's absurdity, millions still believe in it. Sometimes the absurd can only be tackled with more absurd. It's called satire.

>> ^gwiz665:
Guillotines are hilarious - imagine "bring your kid to work day".

Like this?
http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com/strip.aspx?id=de0ea429-53e7-4062-a782-bcaef2f3b7a3

Guillotines are hilarious - imagine "bring your kid to work day". Good times. Gas chambers are fun if they're full of laughing gas.

Anything is funny if framed right.

>> ^thepinky:
You're all so eager to mock Christianity that I think you failed to notice how perverse this is. I wonder what's funny about a crucifixion machine. Considering the hundreds of thousands of people that were brutally and indiscriminately murdered in that way, both in the ancient and modern world, a crucifixion machine is about as funny as gas chambers and guillotines. At least gas chambers and guillotines are quick, whereas crucifixion is prolonged torture. Yeah. Hilarious.


Gas chambers and guillotines can also be funny, if you're not averse to a little black humor, and if it is done in a respectful way. If we are going to talk about negative connotation, we might consider the appropriateness of Christianity to have an infamous torture device as its main symbol.

In reply to this comment by thepinky:
You're all so eager to mock Christianity that I think you failed to notice how perverse this is. I wonder what's funny about a crucifixion machine. Considering the hundreds of thousands of people that were brutally and indiscriminately murdered in that way, both in the ancient and modern world, a crucifixion machine is about as funny as gas chambers and guillotines. At least gas chambers and guillotines are quick, whereas crucifixion is prolonged torture. Yeah. Hilarious.

Crucifixion was horrible torture, true. So: how many people have you seen lately wearing mini guillotines around the necks, or praying in front of mock gas chambers? How many people do you know, on the other hand, who worship an omniscient god who sent his son/self to get brutally tortured and murdered as a scapegoat for his believers?
Despite christianity's absurdity, millions still believe in it. Sometimes the absurd can only be tackled with more absurd. It's called satire.