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There is a new report in the journal "Intelligence" that proposes that people have grown dumber since the Victorian age. They came to this conclusion by studying the time that it takes to react to stimuli, rather than by looking at IQ tests which has been the standard measure until this study. Thoughts?

What does reaction speed have to do with intelligence?

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Forgot to mention that I bought Testament on the recommendation of yourself and Cde. Samnell - good stuff, worth $2 of anybody's money, and now I want a Quedeshot.

Sacred prostitutes are on the list of things I want to parade past my sandbox players at some point. Alas, I sent them off into the wilds and so they ran into a lesbian couple that run an inn instead.

Maybe some kind of druidic fertility rite instead, complete with phallic and yonic fetishes everyone's fiddling with while a woman and a man participate in some kind of pain-sharing magic on the altar, screaming and howling and offering their holy agony and blood to renew the land.

...why did I think of that after I set the game in spring? Dammit. Perfect chance to use the old "you hear horrible screams in the woods" hook.

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Maybe its because I have gay friends and family, maybe its because I live in Sydney and maybe its because of my upbringing, but gay people have always been part of my life so for me gay people arent unusual, or rare and the only difference is the gender of the people that they prefer to be intimate with.

If you keep letting them know we're just ordinary, boring people with ordinary, boring lives, I'll never get enough donations through my front companies to build that big lavender mountain with a giant reservoir tip on it, let alone enough to install the world's largest fountain in that reservoir tip to create brief, artificial rainfalls over the god-fearing neighborhoods downwind.

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I would like to summarize every non-ironic complaint about political correctness ever written:

*deep breath*

*lengthy stream of slurs directed at various races, religions, sexualities, and genders* never used to complain. Back then they knew their place. Those were the days.

Now *same lengthy stream* act like they're as good as the rest of us. What are we, a bunch of *same lengthy stream*?

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Samnell wrote:

Klaus van der Kroft wrote:

Come on, Samnell, there really is no need for that kind of attitude.

I quite agree, but I think I mean it in the opposite direction. It's probably encouraging Azaleas.

I'd give him a lot more leeway, if this was the first time he'd claimed some kind of secret information that he couldn't substantiate or even name the source of.

Yeah, I recall the other thread too. I ought to have mentioned it for context.

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I am an American. My native languages are English and Gaeiac. I know of this nation because I have dealt with people from there. And you have to realize those microstates aren't just there do to Tax Dodges and crap like that. Heck, a LOT of microstates have been around longer than America has been a country. (~200 Years).

Remember what they say about Assuming.

You know of the nation so well that you can't name it. This is why we consider your anatomy chiefly of interest to scatologists. I'm sorry, but assuming you were not a native English speaker was an act of charity on my part. I shan't make that mistake again.

I would say you are talking about Transnistria but for the fact that it resembles barely any of your historical description. Hitler did not opt not to invade it. It was not neutral in WWII; it was part of Hitler's ally Romania. Hitler did not avoid invading it because its might scared him off. It was not neutral in the Cold War; it was part of the USSR. It did have a war with a former Soviet republic, but that war went on for considerably more than twelve days and resulted in hundreds dead.

Furthermore, Moldova was not trying to annex Transnistria. It already owned the land. Rather it was trying to suppress a separatist movement. Likewise Transnistria is more than fractionally larger than Vatican City, clocking in at more than four thousand square kilometers to the Vatican's 0.44.

I'll give it to you, Transnistria fits all your description if we ignore almost all of them and the chief substantive parts of the rest. Also up is down, black is white, and short is long by the same standards.

At the very least, you are exceptionally misinformed. Your bizarre refusal to name the nation suggests that you know as much and are hoping not to be sniffed out.

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I also heard that Comrade Meatrace goes and visits Citizen Aretas every other week.

Now that takes me back...

*applies power drill to eye socket*

Not anymore. All better!

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Aberzombie wrote:

New York was once called New Amsterdam.

And the York part is after the Duke of York, who would later become King James II of England, until he was deposed in The Glorious Revolution for being Catholic and having a son.

There was some reasonable and genuine fear (and a lot of plain hysteria) that James II, who was already pretty autocratic, would give way to a son that was both autocratic and inclined to resume persecution of England's Protestants.

Who had, of course, dutifully persecuted England's Catholics. Who had, of course, dutifully persecuted England's Protestants. Who would continue to persecute England's Catholics, if with somewhat less vigor, for a good century and change more.

Also James II was the son of Charles II and grandson of Charles I, the dude that got shortened by a head. He was also James VII (of Scotland) and James II again (of Ireland). These were all separate nations until 1707, when England and Scotland merged into the Kingdom of Great Britain. Ireland remained separate from then until 1800. Prior to the Acts of Union, all three had their own more or less independent governments that just happened to be headed by the same monarch, like one person DMing for three different groups running three different campaigns.

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Pope Formosus was put to trial after dead in 897 AD. His corpse had to attend the ceremony.

When Charles II came back to be king of England, Scotland, and Ireland he had a bit of a grudge against the men who deposed, tried, and then beheaded his father. So he insisted that the ringleaders, some of whom had died in the interim, face punishment. Three were dug up, hung for a day, and then beheaded. The heads went on spikes for public edification.

Cromwell's head was still up there fifteen years later, at which point a storm blew it down and it passed into private hands.

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Search me DM; it's almost as everyone responding to the discussion of the article with, "But I'm white and male, and my life sucks!" are embodying the exact bias that the interview talks about.

I'm enjoying the conversation, but in a lot of ways it's the Kotaku male privilege thread all over again.

I really think it's always the same conversation. We could swap the adjectives and with very few changes (chiefly correlated with someone ending up on the wrong side of the prevailing social dynamic) and play it out exactly the same way with the same participants.

I humbly suggest this be called Samnell's Grand Unified Theory of Social Justice Conversations.

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Like everyone else in the world that isn't a millionaire, my long series of bad choices began with picking the wrong parents. That one alone virtually ensures you will never become a millionaire, or for that matter even seriously upgrade from the class into which you were born. I compounded that error by being born in one of the most income immobile, stratified societies in the developed world in a period when such inequalities and lack of mobility were on the upswing, and then, not quite satisfied yet, I further chose to be born in a mostly-empty hinterland of said nation thereby depriving me of the numerous advantages I could have accrued from simply being born in an upscale school district or somewhere with access to several very good universities.

Some, trying to duck their personal responsibility for their lot in lives, will say that all of that stuff is luck or not really choices. But we know differently. That's just a story losers tell to console themselves. The truth is that if we really deserved it, we would have picked the correct parents to start with. Entirely our fault for not reading the pamphlets thoroughly.

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Samnell wrote:

GeraintElberion wrote:

Lloyd Jackson wrote:

But... wenches!

The nunnery is Shakespearean-era slang for the whorehouse.

It's difficult to write a cogent sentence of modern English without using at least two pieces of Elizabethan sexual slang. Much Ado About Nothing can be read as "Much Ado About Penises."

Any time he talks about wit you get a double entendre too. Same meaning as nothing. Which, yes, means Rowling made a sex joke when she wrote the motto: Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure.

Not quite right.

Nothing/Noting is slang for vagina.

It makes more sense in a way, denoting a cavity...

Although, we're getting a bit off topic here, probably just making something out of nothing!

** spoiler omitted **

I misremembered. Thank you for setting me straight. So to speak. I confess I am no connoisseur of the subject under consideration.

*rimshot*

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BigNorseWolf wrote:

And I suppose the obvious answer: that there's a contradiction arising from the authorship of multiple, imperfect humans, somehow gets tossed out as an explanation?

Well, of course. Once you start throwing out scripture, where do you stop? You might conclude there's no God at all, just stories written by humans. Whereas if you keep the contradictions, you can solace yourself by pointing to Plato's parable of the shadows on the wall of the cave.

Various authorities have pretty much said that outright in the past. Back at Vatican 2, they convened a panel of experts who recommended by a healthy majority that the Catholic Church adopt a more permissive attitude toward contraception. (It's easy to forget, but back in the Sixties being bent out of shape about and adamantly opposed to contraception and abortion was almost exclusively a Catholic thing.) The hierarchy doubtless performed an anointing with the bowels upon the report on the explicit grounds that accepting it would entail the church being wrong about something and thus injurious to its authority.

Which probably says everything that needs to be said about the hierarchy.

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Ninja'd by Jacobs.

Oh man. Now I have this image of him dressed up in ninja jammies and stealthily slipping into houses at night to leave pamphlets on diversity and inclusion behind.

I think it's the most surreal thing I've thought of since Eat Your Own Clone Day.

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In case any one cares, I'm still offended about the depiction of goblins as smelly, unpleasant and militantly illiterate.

I promise no one thinks that you, personally, are illiterate. :)

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Hm. Haven't been here in a while.

-King Juan Carlos I of Spain is the current claimant of the absent Byzantine Throne (even though there is no throne at present, should the Empire be restituted, he would theoretically have first dibs).

Not just that. Juan Carlos is also technically king of, excluding places in the bounds of modern Spain:

The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Hungary, Sardinia, Corsica, the Algarves, Gibraltar, the East and West Indies, the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea.

He's also maybe Archduke of Austria, depending on how one reads the proclamation the last guy to sit the Habsburgs' thrones issued. Associated directly with that are various titles pertaining to historical French, German, Belgian, and Dutch titles. Pretty good for a Capetian. And yes, Victoria is one of his ancestors. He doesn't use all those titles officially, but reserves the right to them under current Spanish law.

Which would give him one really, really busy pile of heraldry. His current arms are fairly modest, considering those of certain ancestors. Confession: I've played enough Europa Universalis to recognize like three-quarters of that Christmas tree on sight. And because I'm gay. They teach us these things in Gay School. Even the one that looks like a lady part.

Also, even more fabulous.

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I didn't know they still had those.

The internet thinks so. The internet would never lie to us. The internet is our friend.

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W8ith the announcement today that Pope Benedict is to retire from the Papacy at the end of this month the prospect of the next Pope being the last rears its ugly head.

As this Pope was 'Glory of the Olive' according to the Prophecies of St Malachy then the next is going to be 'Petrus Romanus and oversee the destruction of Rome and the Dissolution of the Catholic Church.

Just thought I'd mention it.

I knew I should have helped Carmen Sandiego steal the Vatican when I was there in '98.

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I never understood that male bonding activities. Nor watching sports. Unless its female volleyball.

I don't really get bonding activities in general. People usually have to explain them to me.

"Why is this person shaving his head when he doesn't want to and is not otherwise inclined to?"
"To support his friend."
"But how would that even work?"
"Shared humiliation?"
"That doesn't make sense!"

I think there's a big, nasty paradox in the socially-acceptable models of masculinity, though. The traditional models of masculinity are very limited and don't fit anybody very well. They greatly narrow the range of natural expression require men to deny that they color very far outside the lines. That certainly applies sexually, and a lot of this self-policing involves ducking the appearance of being gay, but I think it's a bit deeper.

Our friends are not necessarily romantic partners, but I think that personal affection and romantic affection are at least closely allied. Wanting to spend time together, caring about one another's feelings, being happy in one another's company, these are all things one feels toward one's partner, but also stuff people feel toward their regular friends. Traditional male bonding activities create a kind of safe social space where one can express those feelings in similar ways without censure.

And of course on some level that produces defensiveness about it by making the feelings something you have to have a special social license to expression, which in turn produces resentment toward those who do not have the license and do it anyway.

Or to paraphrase an old Carlin routine: The most homophobic institutions (he listed sports and the military) are the same ones where men regularly throw their arms around one another and declare that their love for one another.

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Hee hee!

I would imagine that the Klingons really dug the War of the Roses plays.

Not so much the comedies, though.

I think Klingon comedy would have to be some combination of bedroom door-slamming sex farce and torture porn. Most end with the leads eviscerating each other in what, for Klingons, is fairly vanilla coitus. It's all about journey, not destination.

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I started the Books of Samuel. I didn't get very far into it before I got very confused by the golden emerods and mice. WTF?!? I called up my friend who was raised hardcore Christian and has since gotten into Eric van Daniken. Big mistake...

I was just thinking last night about the connections between the alien astronauts invented stuff school of pseudohistory (so von Daniken, but also Graham Hancock, et al) and the anti-stratfordians. Both are a kind of snobbery. The case against Shakespeare authoring his plays is essentially that he was a bumpkin with not a lot of formal education. Von Daniken and company proceed from the assumption that a bunch of dirty primitives could never make such impressive monumental architecture.

I'll be the first in line to call the dead ignorant, as someone will call us down the line. We have the privilege of being born later. But being ignorant is not the same as being stupid and while their educated classes might have believed many things we know to be false, and were certainly smaller than our educated classes, the dead were no more inclined to idiocy than we are. It would take a lot of time to get them up to speed, but if you gave the ancients the same knowledge and tools we have, there's no reason to think they would prove any less capable than we do.

Of course there's also no reason to think they'd prove any more capable than we do, a fact generally missed by a different sort of snob.

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Mouthy Troll wrote:

I nominate we chip in to build a statue of George Washington pissing in a Loyalist's face for downtown Darwin. Who's with me?

When I was a kid, I wanted to see a picture of George Washington beheading King George after a climactic battle, because there could be only one.

My teacher was not amused.

For you. (NSFW)

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After all, no one would bat an eye or care (even the most staunch pro-gay supporters) if there were no gay npcs in their products, so why do otherwise?

Being myself a gay man, I'd say I'm a pretty staunch pro-gay dude. My healthy opinion of myself is doubtless on display in many posts on these boards. So I must be no one, because I would cease buying products from a company I knew had a policy of excluding gay characters. As a matter of fact, I've given serious thought to dropping a novel series that I otherwise quite like as it has swelled and the absence of gay characters has become more and more grating.

I did, however, start buying Paizo stuff much more frequently when I learned that they not only lacked such a policy but had a commitment to inclusiveness. That they do so so well is testimony to the fact that they're not just putting up a PR flag either. That's the kind of company I want to support.

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What is it about the mere mention of a non-hetero attraction between two consenting adults that somehow crosses the line into being harmful to impressionable players/readers? Yeah, it's your home game, do what you want... but why are LGBT people automatically censored in it?

I believe it's to do with our very existence being objectionable, a regrettable fact that they prefer not to be reminded of in their fun time reading. Of course calling it an agenda is a way to stigmatize and vilify: We act from carefully-considered principles; They have the agenda.

There are certainly things I don't want in my fun time reading, but I can't say that I always want it purged of, say, homophobes. A setting where nobody ever objects to LGBT people is very nearly as bizarre and impossible to relate to (if in a more positive way) than one where LGBT people simply don't exist. It's nice for an occasional break, of course.

But really I think Paizo did a great job way back in the original Sandpoint write-up. There's a closeted gay couple that everyone in town knows about and nobody cares except one guy that has an E in his abbreviated alignment. It strains my credulity a lot that a somewhat isolated small town (like the one I live in) is that broad-minded, but I'm willing to spot that as Sandpoint is meant to endear itself to the players and it comes from a world that does not have the same obsessive sexual hangups that ours has so often suffered.

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I have tried to love my neighbor for some decades now. I love my neighbor so that I do not say a single cross word about his choice of partners, his family, or even the plethora of legal rights that attach to them. I do not want him harmed. I want no one to insult or denigrate him or damage his person, his loved ones, or his property for who he is and who he loves. I love him so that I do not want him harassed or any way treated or made to feel as anything less than as good decent a person as I am.

When will he love me the same way? I have waited long years now and see still more long years ahead where no wrong done to me warrants so much as a comment from him but where I am condemned not even for any act I undertook, not for any falsehood I have spread, but for the tone I choose when I report the wrongs done to me and object to their being done to others.

I begin to think this is not the path of wisdom at all, but rather a license to treat others as dirt and deny them the very words they would use to express their suffering.

Sorry, but I'm uppity and not at all sorry about it.

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Thanks - I wonder if people saw it at the time as a continuation of the old Cavaliers vs Roundheads/Whigs vs Tories conflict? I have a vague memory of someone trying to have a pop at the South by re-doing 'Lilibulero'... However, this may not be (is not?) the correct thread for my history queries.

Probably a few did. The white South had a very strong strain of romantic historicism. The second or third bestseller in the decade before the war was Ivanhoe. (Numbers one and two or three are the Bible (KJV) and a large collection of proslavery writings.) A kind of backward-looking, romantic, extremely elitist anglophilia was the trademark of the South Carolina slaveholding class and it also had some adherents in Virginia. Further west tended to have a more white male egalitarian style in the Andrew Jackson mold.

Now that I'm thinking on it, the antebellum era has at least an interesting parallel. The Whig party ideologically preferred the centrality of Congress, to the point where they once contested a presidential election with three or four different candidates in the hopes of denying them all an electoral college majority and thus throwing the election to the House. They distrusted the presidency as it had developed into a position of greater power and authority, especially under Andrew Jackson. (The Whigs started as a We Hate Andy Jackson club.)

The Whigs believed in a fairly activist state that built infrastructure and so forth, but they were also a fairly parochial party that inherited a lot of New England puritanism and the consequent busybody meddler attitude towards the lives of their neighbors. It was a major factor in their becoming the more antislavery of the two parties and also briefly confounded their descendant movements in the 1850s: The Republicans and the Know-Nothings. Many antislavery men, though not Lincoln or Seward, saw slaves, slaveholders, and Irish and German Catholics as inherently sinister threats to the purity of the body politic. For a brief period, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic politics threatened to knock slavery off center stage but the overlap of the two and the Republicans playing better politics meant that the Know-Nothings ended up merged with the GOP and getting almost nothing out of the deal.

It's not an exact thing, but Puritanism & Parliament with a sort of propertied elitist tone does sound a bit Roundheaded.

Of course the contexts are very different. Whiggery's distrust of the executive had a lot to do not just with their origins as an anti-Jackson party but also how they tended to lose presidential elections, winning all of two.

Funny thing about that. Both Whigs who won the presidency died in office: William Henry Harrison after thirty-one days and Zachary Taylor after sixteen months. In both cases a vice-president with rather different politics took over. John Tyler was barely a Whig at all and the party expelled him shortly after he took office. Millard Fillmore, one of America's least notable presidents, abandoned his dead boss's major policies completely and thus either slowed or sped up the progress toward Civil War by getting the Compromise of 1850 through. (It depends how you count and how seriously you rate the South's threats in 1850.) He got the second-best turnout ever for a third party presidential candidate when he ran as a Know-Nothing a few years later.

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Hey Sam, your webpage is awesome and everybody should read it.

Thanks, Doodlebug. Only took about three years of on and off suggesting by friends for me to finally start the thing. :)

*clears throat*

Step right up! Posts every weekday. Endorsed by Doodlebug. Grows your mind and all the parts of your body you want to grow. Even does dishes and mows the lawn. Why aren't you reading Freedmen's Patrol? Be the first on your block!

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Guy Humual wrote:

Kryzbyn wrote:

Guy Humual wrote:

Then explain to me why the 2nd amendment is more valuable then even one life?

It's like Bill Hicks said about the American flag: NSFW language

Are you even reading what I've posted?

I am:

Kryzbyn wrote:

Is the constitution of the US worth more than 26 lives? Yes.

For the thousands that have died for it, the resounding answer is yes.

No amount of corpses piled up around an idea can improve its content or its worth in the slightest. People die for stupid, false, and evil doctrines every day of the year. You could stack them up in the hundreds of billions and they'd make no difference at all to any person with an ounce of sense.

Think about it for a second: Do you give a crap about all the Germans who died for Hitler's ideas? Stalin's? Jefferson Davis's?

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Wow. Just wow.

It's like there's a consistent anti-science worldview at work.

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Freehold DM wrote:

murdering children is not okay. ever.

Abortion?

I had one last week, but thank you for offering.

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A propos to recent posts.

So yeah, take a look at this image! We can discuss military deaths and terrorism deaths without getting into some wildly diversionary screed about how some other party has it worse. Yet when it comes to discussing women, suddenly anyone else is more important.

It's like there's a whole social system built up around male privilege that defends itself in part by screaming we ought not look at the person behind the curtain no matter what that person is up to. I think I heard a name for it somewhere.

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Many feminists don't acknowledge these distinctions, instead preferring to paint everything with the same broad brush of patriarchy, and many do not even acknowledge or respond to the criticisms levelled at them, instead resorting to ad hominem attacks and character defamation.

I am unsure how to respond to this staggering level of cluelessness. It's obvious you've never had even the most basic familiarity with feminism and you simply ignore every attempt to acquaint you with the basics. (I could say the same thing about history based on the first paragraph of the post I'm quoting, incidentally.)

So let's try it this way: physician, heal thyself.

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Exactly BNW. I mean, if the Patriarchy exists as many feminists believe it does, why would the men who direct society for the benefit and privilege of their own sex have these kinds of issues that blatantly shoot themselves in the foot? Either Fifty Shades of Grey is on to something about the sadomasochistic nature of men, or the patriarchy doesn't exist and the people that believe it does are mistaking the circumstances that led to the current societal build to have been motivated by active malice rather than external pressures like location, or internal factors like brain chemistry.

Or the patriarchy is not an absolute invariant law of nature that applies in all fields in all ways with no possible exception now or at any time in the past and future, but rather reflects the broad preponderance of privilege that skews radically (if not so radically as it did in past decades) to the benefit of males.

Which is, you know, how actual feminists see the patriarchy instead of how a collection of internet misogynists imagine it is.

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Or I would, you know, argue for Federal gridlock, not just Legislative.
Which Ive been doing.

Edit- Also, Ive noticed that the populace also relies on their state governments to take up the Federal slack. I agree with this. See Colorado and Washington with their marijuana legalisation. See the states that are beginning to allow gay marriage. Hell, even though I disagree, look at Arizona with their immigration laws.

Or look at South Carolina with its slaves. It's not like we've never tried trusting the states. It's that we have and they almost without exception come up with horrors. Why would we expect them to suddenly become angels after spending two centuries doing their damnedest to out-evil one another and prevent goods pioneered elsewhere from getting in the way of their domestic evils? Might as well vote for the Klan. Arizona pretty much is, after all.

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Evil Lincoln wrote:

Stop and think: one ideology over the other? Are there only two?

That's how the issues generally seem to present themselves. Individual liberty vs. collective good. Rationality vs. Consequentialism. John Locke and Sigmund Freud vs. Karl Marx and Frederic Nietzsche. Objective morality vs. subjective morality. Brain chemistry and natural law vs. social engineering and statism.

Those aren't even all dichotomies. To pick one at random: 'natural law' is literally nothing more than a set of preferences someone doesn't want to be honest about. At best, it's the set of things the speaker wants to be universals. It's trivial to concoct a natural law system to support anything at all.

Unless, of course, by natural law you mean things like gravity. But gravity is not a political issue.

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Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

meatrace wrote:

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Equating male and female circumcision is like feminists decrying the lack of a urinal in the ladies room. No matter how equal you try to make things some things just ain't gonna be the same.

I have an acquaintance/friend who is pretty hardcore into gender equality. I try not to bring it up, because her and I disagree rather a lot. But she was basically shaking she was so mad at the idea of mens rooms having urinals. Largely because of a FTM trans friend who felt "awkward" in men's rooms.

If seeing a urinal hurts your feelings, you might want to reevaluate some s@~#.

See, it's feminists like THIS that I take issue with.

Yes but the left keeps that level of whacko consigned to the dark and shady corners of the internet.

The right gives that level of whacko their own radio show, TV show, and network.

And elected office.

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Zousha, at this point I think we need to step back to a more fundamental problem. You're not answering my question, but I think you probably believe that Mr. Youtube did. I did not bother with his video, as he showed himself entirely untrustworthy less than 30 seconds into the first one I saw, but did give his blog post a very cursory skim since I didn't have to listen to his voice. It didn't offer any explanation for how LGBT rights are going to 1) marginalize or 2) undermine biological families either.

Honestly I don't know how it's even theoretically possible for us to accomplish that.

So let me rephrase this a little.

How do you, not Mr. Youtube, know that LGBT rights is all about doing the aforementioned? You're into skepticism, right? Make the case. If it helps, you might want to start by explaining what you mean by biological families, their being marginalized and/or undermined.

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LGBT activism claims to advocate for equal rights but in doing so marginalizes and breaks up the biological family

Ok, I need to stop you right here and ask a question:

HOW? I mean, I'm a gay dude and I think gay sex is pretty much the bee's knees, but how is me and my boyfriend getting it off and then getting married marginalizing and breaking up anybody's biological family?

This is what I'm asking for when I want the step-by-step. How does letting GLBT people serve in the military, adopt children, marry, not get murdered for loving while non-hetero, etc, actually do any of that.

Separate, but related topic. You've asked for some stuff you could read to help broaden your perspectives. You appear to have the fundamentalist and wild misogynist fringe (Valerie Solanis as a leading light of feminist thought? Really!?) adequately covered, which is great because I lack the inclination to give recommendations for those. Instead I offer this. Given your citation of the non-aggression principle, this part is especially relevant. If you want a little more thorough, here you go.

If you want to learn more about actual modern feminism, you could do worse than head on over to Atheism+ and ask some polite questions in their Information and Answers forum. Because to be blunt, your description of the movement resembles reality no more than I resemble a magical princess.

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Comrade Anklebiter wrote:

Then how come every time Samnell is around, Comrade Anklebiter isn't far behind? Huh?

Because you're bumming rides off him?

Bums and riding are definitely involved. I don't know how much longer my hips and back can take it. I mean, do I look like I'm used to carrying a lot of rear-mounted weight?

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It's more a concern about the picture this video paints: that we're tottering on the edge of societal and economic collapse that's been engineered by cultural Marxists since the end of the Second World War, and that a lot of the things I grew up believing in, like public education, LGBT rights, and state/federally funded programs like the ones that helped me find employment following high school and college, were all basically lies designed to undermine the fabric of the western world to usher in a new age of totalitarianism, and that by benefiting and contributing to these sorts of things, I've aided and abetted that collapse.

I'm going to take just one thing here because, well, the amount of wrong in that quote is staggering.

Zousha, can you explain to me how LGBT rights undermine the fabric of the western world? How are they going to lead to the collapse of the economy and society? Give me the step by step here.

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Torillan wrote:

Samnell wrote:

I stopped at the first blatant lie. That took 24 seconds. The first thing you can do is learn to spot lies better.

Maybe I missed it...what "lie" did you hear?

Just curious...

That would be "where their are socialists, communists are never far behind."

Which is demonstrably false.

The vast majority of western and northern europe, are social democracies. They have never been communist states, and communism has never really stood a serious chance in these states.

Exactly. It's so obviously wrong that the speaker has to either know it and be deliberately lying or very paranoid.

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After watching this video, I've become deeply concerned about the state of things here in America. What can I do?

How Cultural Marxism is Implemented

I stopped at the first blatant lie. That took 24 seconds. The first thing you can do is learn to spot lies better.

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Yeah, we've all had that moment on the internet, just wanted to be sure I wasn't insulting anyone.

We just got off an the wombly foot is all, SWEET AS CRACKERJACK!

BJs behind the gym!

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Icyshadow wrote:

The thing is, can Israel really risk letting them all in? Jews will become a minority in "their own country".

Not too long after, they'll either be the ones persecuted again, or driven out completely like they have usually been.

Well, this is where South Africa becomes a very pertinent example. If you give the entire population of your land-space the vote, and your government gets voted into non-existance, your government was never all that stable to begin with.

Or Jim Crow America, of course.

I'm a casual fan of Jewish culture. Like most Americans I've probably consumed more output from Jewish creators than anything but white anglo-saxon protestants. I'm not very concerned about ethnic heritage and all that, but if I had to pick a culture to have been raised in, American Jewish culture would at least make the shortlist. But the notion of a Jewish state has always been ominous to me. I mean ethnic nationalism never works out well for local minorities, something that European Jews (admittedly not a majority in Israel) have probably noticed.

So why would it work any better this time? Preserving the Jewish character of Israel is deeply suspicious, especially when that character preservation requires massive disenfranchisement. Needing tactics like this to achieve one's goals is a good indicator that one has a horrible set of goals even absent the rest.

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Oh, I am familiar with The Story of "O".

Goblins do it in the street! (When they can escape from being held imprisoned by creepy Frenchmen)

Many goblins prayed for freedom, but it never did them any good until they started praying with their feet. And teeth. Mostly teeth. Sometimes fire.

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I have a hard time imagining any modern politician giving a ninety minute stump speech after being shot in the chest.

It's a little-known fact that Teddy's sweat alone contains enough testosterone to spontaneously induce puberty in lab rats, people, and many inanimate objects. He recruited the Rough Riders by doing thirty push-ups, wiping his brow, and then flicking his hand at a wall. They congealed from the plaster, ready to fight.

The properties of his other fluids are kept secret for national security reasons.

But Teddy had a sensitive side. In his autobiography, any time he lit on an uncomfortable topic the narrative simply skips ahead.

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I'm still inching through Foner. It's really good but some of it's hard to read. Passages about how slavery gets ended and racial equality advances are a lot easier to take than long sections about the evisceration of unions. Almost up to the Sixties now, but then after that it's the backlash to finish out the book.

After I'm going to be reading a lot of Civil War stuff because [shameless]I started a blog.[/shameless]

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So to sum up the night's results:

• We reelected President Obama. He didn't even need Ohio.
  
• Elizabeth Warren won.
  
• Tammy Baldwin won.
  
• Joe Donnelley won.
  
• Claire McCaskill won.
  
• Multiple states voted to legalize recreational marijuana.
  
• Same-sex marriage was legalized by popular vote for the first time.
  
• California voted to fund its schools and to fix Three Strikes.
  
• Puerto Rico voted to move forward with the process of becoming the country's 51st state.
  
• Nate Silver correctly predicted every state's vote - 50 out of 50 right.

It was a good night to be a Democrat.

All wonderful, but this is also especially sweet.

Rob "rape is a gift from God" Mourdock and Todd "it's not rape if you get pregnant" Akin LOST. Here's to hoping those a!$@%!!s retire to the wingnut welfare circuit and are never at risk to win office again. And also that they're never in positions of power over women.