How did he not die?!?!?

That escalated quickly...

I'm not surprised you're acting like a douche, either.

Seriously? You're gonna go with that here? Wow...

Is it really that hard to accept that there's still racism? Yeah, there's reverse racism, too, before you even bring that up Pavlovian style, but that hasn't a thing to do with this.

LOL!

Nice try deflecting from the point of this video:

Sarah Palin is an idiot. Period. And this should be something conservatives, liberals, and moderates from both parties should be able to agree on without any hesitation.

I don't understand why the GOP allows this moron to speak in any kind of event like this. It's absolutely mind boggling.

MMILF!!!

If that works for you, rock on.

But I don't care otherwise.

I love reading a comment section with religious people who back up their views with religion and weak scientific evidence to back up their points, and secularists who back up their arguments with scientific evidence with little to no religious evidence. It's the stuff that epic battles are made of.

It's interesting because both sides should already know they're not able to convince the other, yet both believe the other's evidence contradicts each other, and is often willing to use evidence from the other side to prove the contradiction when they don't fully understand what that evidence actually says or means. Although, in this case, kudos to the secularists who didn't give a rat's ass what the bible says and didn't try to use it.

Why Christians try to prove or disprove anything to secularists or scientists with biblical evidence, I'll never know.

@Trancecoach

I don't comment much at all for years, but I did just want to say that people complaining about politicians acting like elitists apparently don't recognize some very key facts about voters:

Most people want the government to spend more (take your pick whether it's favoring increased spending on social programs, or it's more spending on defense, etc.), yet want to be taxed less. Just that fact alone proves how stupid the general electorate is. An alarming portion of voters can't tell you accurately the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, don't understand how market forces are supposed to work, or even be able to recognize what is and isn't a socialist idea at its core.

I don't mean this as an attack on Democratic voting blocs specifically, nor Republican voting blocs. I mean this as an attack against the intellectual ability of most American voters. And when the voting public is that ignorant, ideologically blind, or just plain stupid, what do you think some people are going to do, regardless of their party's affiliation? They're gonna try to take advantage of it.

And doing things to hide key aspects of legislation in order to get support is hardly new, and hardly unique to either side. Explain to me how doing those things is any different than making ridiculous claims about Obamacare that have no bearing on reality different?

Remember those? They're gonna kill grandma! DEATH PANELS!

"Obamacare is a complete socialist takeover of the healthcare system!" That one just proves my point. The conservative right spent decades programming the American voting population to equate socialism as bad, when so many people don't even know what socialism actually is, and they did this despite numerous examples of when largely socialist policies have been resounding successes. Then they make a completely false claim that Obamacare is a complete socialist take over of the US health care system, when it isn't to fire up their voting blocs to oppose it, along with anyone else who is too stupid to know what "complete socialism" would actually look like in the health care system (hint: single payer), and who are stupid or ideologically blind enough to recognize successful largely socialist policies (like institutionalizing compulsory public education as a DUH example).

Where the hell was your outrage then? You think those (we'll call them) criticisms were coming out of voters spontaneously? No, they were thrown into the ring by GOP and conservative leaders as tools to manipulate public opinion into opposing Obamacare when they were flaming piles of bullcrap.

So either you're one of the idiots, or you're one of many partisans trying to spread your BS incredulity at the other side.

And to be clear, I'm not attacking you because you're a conservative. I'm attacking you because this is either hypocrisy or ideological blindness at its worst.

So many things wrong with this argument...

A. I don't see politicians going around shooting people with guns, so what on earth does this have to do with the topic?!
B. Yes, yes, we have an epidemic of children getting killed with explosives right now. No, that's right... we have school SHOOTINGS... you know... WITH GUNS! And what do we do about crazy people with explosives?! Have everyone else carry explosives?!
C. Yes, you are correct... not everyone just wants your TV. Yes, in some cases, they're psychopaths, and you'd be better off with a gun than society having sweeping gun control. Also, in a small fraction of car accidents, wearing a seat belt could actually kill you, too.

Do you see the problem with your argument? The very fact that we all can get guns so easily, and the fact they are so pervasive increases the chances of someone having a gun who would like to attack you, and you having a gun doesn't make up for that increased chance. So you can site individual situations all you want, but statistics are readily available that show beyond a shadow of a doubt that sweeping gun control does overall make you safer.
D. Pretty sure his argument wasn't that we need gun control with our military.
E. It's naive of you to believe you're "protecting yourself" by owning a gun, when we know society is safer with sweeping gun control.

I am not a supporter of Objectivism, but to say Ayn Rand didn't support anything, but was only against things isn't accurate. She was passionately in favor of capitalism, reason, science, and individual rights. Her biggest weakness was as unwavering belief that she was right, and everyone else was wrong without any doubts whatsoever, even when the evidence was practically slapping her in the face because if something contradicted her philosophy, it had to be wrong.

Her affair with Nathaniel Branden was a perfect example. You can't say she was anti-marriage. She was however passionately in favor of affairs in marriage if one felt as she did about Branden, even as her husband and his wife drank themselves into oblivion in a feable attempt to cope.

If you think she was simply contrarian, then you completely missed what her ideas were.

Objectivism doesn't ally very well with the current GOP party, actually. Objectivism is very much against gov't cronyism. Also, Objectivism is extremely liberal on social issues.

It is true that Objectivism is very closely aligned with libertarianism, but that ain't the Tea Party socially.

So many holes in your argument.

You're cherry picking the parts of Nazism to fit your anti-religious views. You even made the argument that Russia was dogmatically atheist, which isn't a true characterization of Russia then, either.

The simple fact of the matter is racial supremacy had what was seen as extremely scientific underpinnings with a foundation of Darwin, which then was applied to Social Darwinism, etc.

You had Nazi scientists who were going around the world literally measuring people's skulls, with the assumption that Germans had bigger brain pans, and that must explain why they're the master race.

Those ideas sure as hell weren't religious.

The simple fact of the matter is that there were secular and religious arguments against Nazism, as there also were secular and religious arguments in favor of it at the time.

It's very difficult to argue that the evil of Nazi Germany rose due to the level of dogmatic behavior within Germany. Prior to Hitler's rise, Germany was considered a Western European modernized, industrialized country, and for the time well educated, as was France and Britain. It was far more like Britain and France than it was to Russia.

An even better counterargument - who was the most modernized, secular, educated people in Southeast Asia, and therefore should have been the least likely to instigate war according to your logic? Japan, yet they became an imperial, aggressive power.

The rise of Nazi Germany is something I studied quite a bit of, and boiling it down to how dogmatic the people were is not only overly simplistic, it's not remotely historically accurate. It completely factors out the god awful mistake the Treaty of Versailles from WWI was, the common particular disdain for Jews at the time (some due to religious conflict, for Nazis it was more about race), the dependency of Germany on US loans, which dried up when the Great Depression began, the scientific trends in thought at the time, etc.

Those all converged.

And the reality is that "Muslim" countries are more likely to subject women to numerous horrors simply because more Muslim countries have not modernized their economies yet. Hey, just like every other religion. The reason we treat women well is we've had an industrialized economy far longer, and even then, the speed of it was often circumstantial. Women's rights in the US took a quantum leap forward because of women being needed for labor in WWII (same reason the Civil Rights Movement started so relatively soon after WWII as well).