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Everything posted by prole
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That's when you start looking for the furthest parking space in the next rest area. Unnghh...
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Yes, we know you're a legal fetishist. You can stop riding that hobby horse so hard.
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And another... [video:youtube]
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Give me a fucking break. You can do better than this. Sleeping through the past ten years again Kojak? It's a pretty well documented phenomenon.
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Nothing against Muslims, but I do loathe the set of ideas and ethical convictions that is at the heart of the strain of Islam that's been on the rise for the past 30-40 years. What is it that you like about fundamentalist Islam? How compatible is it - as it's understood and preached in Saudi funded Mosques, Pakistani Madrassas, Taliban encampments, and Hamas militia gatherings - with the institutional priorities of the ACLU? As it turns out, American leftists subscribe to the age-old adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". I suspect this Islam fetish that ankle-grabbers like TTK, j_b, and Prole are currently a part of will fade when the Great American Empire (read: the Great Satan) crumbles to the ground--at which point they will deny they ever defended the "religion of peace". I'm not sure how trying to better understand why fundamentalisms, all abhorrent, have become so prevalent in the last decades constitutes a defense. Certainly the anti-Commie freedom fighter turned "zey ah zuh duhzeze, we ah zee cure" hasn't worked out too good. Like the rest of your antique notions, it's time for a new reading of the situation. Not that the readings are necessarily new since the left has been saying "I told you so" for longer than anyone can remember.
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"Sticking it to the man" I can get behind but I'm not sure that vigilantism and libtards getting their jollies from sadistic revenge scenarios has anything whatever to do with leftist politics.
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Sorry, it's tripe.
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I wonder if the same could be said about our Christian Problem. I'll be a happy man if the total death toll from religious fanaticism in Muslim countries is 1-2 people per 300 million every 4-5 years, and they manage to institute an set of institutional safeguards for individual liberties that equals our own despite our "Christian Problem." The major unstated premise behind your comment is that all religions, and by extension, all sets of religious convictions are fundamentally the same, and thereby equally likely to arouse violent fanaticism in their adherents, and present equal obstacles to the advancement of liberal values. The logical correlate of this is that what people believe - their most fundamental and deeply held convictions - have absolutely no influence over how they understand the world and behave in response to what they experience in it. If you believe that, then I suppose you can believe that that a religion that has an extreme commitment to non-violence at it's core (let's take Harris's example of Jainism as an example), and a religion that has adopted the concept of holy-war in defense of the faith as a central duty of all believers are equally likely to produce suicide bombers. Crazy. As with every other debate we've had on this topic, you completely miss the point. Here it is: though all religions are not all the same, the Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam (and others) share bloodthirsty texts and an historical proclivity towards violent conversion and expansion. If one has "outgrown" (or more likely, temporarily set aside) those tendencies, it's question of what kind of socio-political and economic conditions developed that swept aside fundamentalism and religiously-derived political authority. The existence of widespread religious fundamentalism in the Middle East cannot be explained simply by appealing to violent passages in the Koran or pointing to medieval Islamic crusades or essentializing Islam or Muslims but rather by the very real historical conditions that are currently giving immediate political meaning to those texts. Yes, the texts exist, people act on them, but the underlying social conditions are what make those texts important to people, identify with, and act upon them at particular points in time. Sorry if that hasn't jived with US geostrategic interests and their need to preserve repressive client regimes to protect the flow of cheap oil, fight the Commies (within those countries and the USSR), and protect the Israeli Outpost.
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I wonder if the same could be said about our Christian Problem.
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What Tvash's juxtaposition of reality-based reportage with the original post touches on and what numerous examples of shrewder analysis makes clear, is that hyperbolic dismissal is exactly what is appropriate here. There is plenty of work out there that does a fine job of contextualizing the recent events, sheds light on the actually existing conditions in Egypt, the role and strengths of elements within Egyptian civil society (including the Muslim Brotherhood) and takes into account the various dangers that fundamentalism poses. The notion that Fux simply constitutes an equally valid, competing "viewpoint" is absurd. They should be called out on their shit at every opportunity, not coddled in some relativist marshmallow fog of "interpretation".
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Thanks for the reminder that Fux can always be outdone in hysterical apoplexy by rightwing Israeli press.
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It's not clear from any of the clips above that a policy response based on those readings would amount to anything less than an endorsement of a Tienanmen-style crackdown. Let freedumb reign.
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Everybody jump up and down like red-butt monkeys! Once again making us thank our lucky stars that McCain didn't win. [video:youtube]
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Between this, blowing the lid off the Chris Matthews controversy and Rush Limbaugh talking all chinesey, the Republicans are well on their way to forming a coherent foreign and domestic policy.
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Has the Schumer camp issued a statement on this yet?
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This one's almost as good as when Chris Matthews called it the Panama Canal!!!
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Wasn't the provision to require Americans to buy private insurance a sop to the insurance lobby and conservative Democrats?
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This thread is amazing. [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=svOlz2ei4Yk