i like telling dirty jokes and i like smoking crystal meth, but mostly, i <3 you. In reply to this comment by thinker247:
Let's take our show to Vegas, where people appreciate humor and various venereal diseases.

Let's take our show to Vegas, where people appreciate humor and various venereal diseases.

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

I like a game with strong plot and story. IMHO, the best space opera game every created is the humble EV Nova, followed closely by the venerable Star Control II.

^If I know anything, it's how to spell venereal diseases.

Wonder what the death toll is going to be from today

It's a great place. Was hopping to go back there for a year or so in the near future. Looks like it will probably be a bit too civil-war-y (or fascist)

Sad

I actually worked for the military dictatorship there in 2007 (barely, I was teaching in a state highschool), before the 'civil' powers took over. Biggest bunch of plutocrats you'll find in the modern world. Want to set up a system that makes the house of lords seem reasonable.
On the other hand Thaksin's drug war killed 3~5,000 people and the reds venerate that draconian bastard.
Hard to choose a side.

Oh, Winstonfield. Your obviously-biased rhetoric becomes a tiresome trudge. Palin doesn't have people thinking she's an idiot just grabbed out of nowhere. She created that visage herself by saying things like that she has foreign policy experience because she can see Russia from her house. The truth is, no matter how well she memorizes boilerplate talking-points, no one will trust her after her faux 'debate' with Biden where she just chose to ignore the questions and spout more bolierplate. And the bullshit about 'real America'. Shes just a mire of partisan idiocy. I feel sorry for people who trust this woman when she's shown from the get go that she's just a sham. I must say, having her as some sort of figurehead in your country makes others in the world exceptionally pitiful of you. That someone who has no ability to defend their beliefs, no ability to govern in ways that are not corrupt, no common sense of when to speak and when to not could become such a venerated figure in some circles is so sad.

Maybe she'll go to school and take a trip somewhere outside of the States for the first time in her life. Maybe she actually has some sort of hidden potential that she just needs time to make shine. It's possible. It seems very unlikely, but it's possible. Maybe she'll help inspire those wallowing in ignorance who look up to her. Help them out of their ignorance by being an example of a changed person. I would welcome that. But from what she has shown and is continuing to show, she chooses to be someone who wears their ignorance like a badge of honour. Like it's a good thing that sticking to one's guns that a mastery of foreign policy could come from a vision of, and not a walk to, the other shore. Until she has made it clear that she has chosen knowledge instead of her particular brand of uninformed but active vexation, she will continue to keep her self-made visage of ignorance. And rightfully so.

In a conservative society, all power structures were geared toward respecting authority and respecting age and experience. Your goal - your entire understanding of the world, in fact - was that tomorrow would be just like today, and therefore your best bet was to learn from people who had lived through the greatest number of these unchanging days. Old people were much more equipped to handle the world than young people, because old people had already seen it all once before. Obviously it was a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy - the elderly, having learned and hardened themselves in a specific social mold, could only pass on that specific mold when they were respected ('deified', as Craig puts it), so they did their part in keeping society as constant and unchanging as possible. If you didn't have gay rights when grandpa was young, it's unlikely that you'd learn anything about gay rights from grandpa, and if he's your source of authority you will grow up to be as ignorant of gay rights as he is.

Naturally this has changed - advances in technology, in material well-being (for parts of the world), as well as in social and political theory and structures, have resulted in a more progressive Western society. Change is expected and welcomed; the experiences of your ancestors no longer apply to the reality your children will face, meaning that it's the young and the freshly trained who have the best chance of understanding what's actually going on. The oldest in our society are no longer best equipped to make sense of the world; the respect and deification they received has been passed down at least a decade or two.

I don't disagree that this has lead to a distasteful new variety of the already fairly shallow and unpleasant consumerist culture of the west, and I don't disagree that it has encouraged the rise of an 'imbecilic' (sub)culture, but I understand that if these are the negative side effects of actually, for the first time in history, having a society that's somewhat progressive, then that's acceptable to me. I'll work on reducing the negative impact of those side effects in my own daily life as far as I can, but I won't try to appeal to some conservative dream of venerating the old and the eternally stable.

Craig might as well be up there ranting about how being allowed to express yourself on the internet is dangerously undermining our respect for traditional experts and authorities - maybe so, but we can't exactly go back to only allowing a voice to one percent of the people.

Also I would like to point out that I thought about redacting my "no class" statement, but in light of this new evidence, well. Lets just say that if I had a first hand account of MJ showing photos of venereal diseases to 12 year olds I wouldn't attend his memorial dressed as him.

But that's just me.

"My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes."

Ronald Reagan, Said during a radio microphone test, 1984

*****

And there are still people who venerate this man.

From M.I.T.'s The Tech publication:



THE SECULAR CASE AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE

Adam Kolasinksi

Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason to grant them the costly benefits of marriage.

The Tech, Volume 124, Number 5
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

The debate over whether the state ought to recognize gay marriages has thus far focused on the issue as one of civil rights. Such a treatment is erroneous because state recognition of marriage is not a universal right. States regulate marriage in many ways besides denying men the right to marry men, and women the right to marry women. Roughly half of all states prohibit first cousins from marrying, and all prohibit marriage of closer blood relatives, even if the individuals being married are sterile. In all states, it is illegal to attempt to marry more than one person, or even to pass off more than one person as one's spouse. Some states restrict the marriage of people suffering from syphilis or other venereal diseases. Homosexuals, therefore, are not the only people to be denied the right to marry the person of their choosing.

I do not claim that all of these other types of couples restricted from marrying are equivalent to homosexual couples. I only bring them up to illustrate that marriage is heavily regulated, and for good reason. When a state recognizes a marriage, it bestows upon the couple certain benefits which are costly to both the state and other individuals. Collecting a deceased spouse's social security, claiming an extra tax exemption for a spouse, and having the right to be covered under a spouse's health insurance policy are just a few examples of the costly benefits associated with marriage. In a sense, a married couple receives a subsidy. Why? Because a marriage between to unrelated heterosexuals is likely to result in a family with children, and propagation of society is a compelling state interest. For this reason, states have, in varying degrees, restricted from marriage couples unlikely to produce children.

Granted, these restrictions are not absolute. A small minority of married couples are infertile. However, excluding sterile couples from marriage, in all but the most obvious cases such as those of blood relatives, would be costly. Few people who are sterile know it, and fertility tests are too expensive and burdensome to mandate. One might argue that the exclusion of blood relatives from marriage is only necessary to prevent the conception of genetically defective children, but blood relatives cannot marry even if they undergo sterilization. Some couples who marry plan not to have children, but without mind-reaching technology, excluding them is impossible. Elderly couples can marry, but such cases are so rare that it is simply not worth the effort to restrict them. The marriage laws, therefore, ensure, albeit imperfectly, that the vast majority of couples who do get the benefits of marriage are those who bear children.

Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.

One may argue that lesbians are capable of procreating via artificial insemination, so the state does have an interest in recognizing lesbian marriages, but a lesbian's sexual relationship, committed or not, has no bearing on her ability to reproduce. Perhaps it may serve a state interest to recognize gay marriages to make it easier for gay couples to adopt. However, there is ample evidence (see, for example, David Popenoe's Life Without Father) that children need both a male and female parent for proper development. Unfortunately, small sample sizes and other methodological problems make it impossible to draw conclusions from studies that directly examine the effects of gay parenting. However, the empirically verified common wisdom about the importance of a mother and father in a child's development should give advocates of gay adoption pause. The differences between men and women extend beyond anatomy, so it is essential for a child to be nurtured by parents of both sexes if a child is to learn to function in a society made up of both sexes. Is it wise to have a scoial policy that encourages family arrangements that deny children such essentials? Gays are not necessarily bad parents, nor will they necessarily make their children gay, but they cannot provide a set of parents that includes both a male and a female.

Some have compared the prohibition of homosexual marriage to the prohibition of interracial marriage. This analogy fails because fertility does not depend on race, making race irrelevant to the state's interest in marriage. By contrast, homosexuality is highly relevant because it precludes procreation.

Some argue that homosexual marriages serve a state interest because they enable gays to live in committed relationships. However, there is nothing stopping homosexuals from living in such relationships today. Advocates of gay marriage claim gay couples need marriage in order to have hospital visitation and inheritance rights, but they can easily obtain these rights by writing a living will and having each partner designate the other as trustee and heir. There is nothing stopping gay couples from signing a joint lease or owning a house jointly, as many single straight people do with roommates. The only benefits of marriage from which homosexual couples are restricted are those that are costly to the state and society.

Some argue that the link between marriage and procreation is not as strong as it once was, and they are correct. Until recently, the primary purpose of marriage, in every society around the world, has been procreation. In the 20th century, Western societies have downplayed the procreative aspect of marriage, much to our detriment. As a result, the happiness of the parties to the marriage, rather than the good of the children or the social order, has become its primary end, with disastrous consequences. When married persons care more about themselves than their responsibilities to their children and society, they become more willing to abandon these responsibilities, leading to broken homes, a plummeting birthrate, and countless other social pathologies that have become rampant over the last 40 years. Homosexual marriage is not the cause for any of these pathologies, but it will exacerbate them, as the granting of marital benefits to a category of sexual relationships that are necessarily sterile can only widen the separation between marriage and procreation.

The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage. If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis cant it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction that love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos.

Adam Kolasinski is a doctoral student in financial economics.

That was great. Don't know where messanger is getting 'boring' from. Little surprised that Arther C. Clark didn't get a mention in Mr. Randi's list of the venerable departed. He only left us a handful of months ago

It looks pretty hard to control, spinning around as it does in the video. Rather like the venerable Digi-Q.

obsidian (n): a volcanic glass which is one of the finest raw materials for the chipping of stone tools.

obsidianfire (n, vt): a burning venereal disease caused by taking too many big black peckers up the wazoo.

She is very well spoken considering the stereotype put on individuals in the porn industry.

"In November 2001, the venerable Oxford Union debating society invited Jameson to come to Oxford to argue against the proposition "The House Believes that Porn is Harmful."[34] She wrote in her diary at the time, "I feel like I am going to be out of my element, but, I could never pass this chance up... it's a once in a lifetime thing."[100] In the end, her side won the debate 204 to 27.[11]"

That's impressive. Also, here is something else funny regarding Jenna vs. O'Reilly:

"In February 2003, Pony International planned to feature her as one of several porn stars in advertisements for athletic shoes. This was attacked by Bill O'Reilly of Fox News in an editorial called "Using Quasi-Prostitutes to Sell Sneakers", calling porn stars inappropriate role models for teens.[101] In response, The Harvard Crimson proposed a boycott of O'Reilly and Fox News.[102] Jameson herself fought back with a sarcastic email to the show, writing:

I hope Bill understands the difference between a porn star and a hooker. I assume he has done some research on the subject because he requested some of my videos after we finished taping my appearance. I imagine he wanted them for professional reasons.[103]"

Just denying a problem exists does not make it disappear. Of course if you define followers of the "Real" Muslim faith as those who don't oppress women then you can go and make the claim that the Muslim faith isn't sexist. The unfortunate truth is that regardless of the arbitrary definitions the speaker in this video asserts, a substantial amount of nations made up of mostly Muslims have deplorable track records on women's treatment and rights. Countries like Saudia Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Much of the subjugation in these societies is based upon a fundamentalist following of the Islamic faith. If this man was really concerned with women's rights he would have spent his time at the podium condemning these actions and calling for change instead of throwing up a smoke screen. Very disingenuous.

And then there was the second half of the video
"the 148,000 prostitutes that walk the streets of the UK, or the 76,000 prostitutes that walk the streets of Holland"

Umm, using this guys own criteria on how to determine if a group is being oppressed, shouldn't he talk to the prostitutes? Who the hell is he to declare they are being oppressed?

"Naked little girls walking around Australia, with no clothes on"

What? Where in the hell is this guy even getting this shit? And I'm willing to bet that everyone in the room just ate it up as if it were literal fact.

"prostitution, venereal disease, prostitution, pedophilia and this horrendous number of children being raped and kidnapped that exists in the western world, it is almost unheard of in the Muslim world. So I think the statistics kinda like, speak for themselves."

(So shocked my jaw fucking dropped) I forgot that the Muslim countenance was white as snow. Nevermind those honour killings or acid attacks.