Scraps

In Europe the government hasnt done any of this, but you still said Europe fucked up by printing a toon. How can it befucked up, if you are in favor of the freedom to do such things? Either you meant that ordinary ppl in europe shouldnt have the freedom to draw cartoons, or you meant something else which i cant grasp. Yelling racial slurs in an urban ghetto is a bad idea and someone who did it definitely fucked up, but he should have the freedom to do so. Having rights incurs a duty of responsible usage. Printing that cartoon was irresponsible but they were still within their rights to do so. Get it?

This is exactly the opposite of what i said in your quote. It is also a flipflop of what you said earlier. You now say you support the freedom to criticize religion, but you called it racism earlier, and racism is forbidden by your very own laws: I am in favor of the equal treatment of your flag to any other symbol. Postman is against this, and with your confusing flipflops im not sure what your stance is. I believe this confusion stems from your inability to comprehend anything you read.

Wait. By supporting the freedom of Americans to criticize religion, I'm for free speech. But if I support the freedom of Americans to criticize their own government, I'm anti-free speech? Jesus christ, you're a nutsack.

Let me break this down to the basest level of American free speech law: Our government represent our citizens but our citizens may not necessarily represent our government. People in public positions are supposed to be representing the public. They're not acting in a civilian capacity, they're acting in a civilian capacity. As soon as Tom P. Official clocks in to work, he's not Tom P. Official. He's the ________ that represents all the American people. So while Denmark may have gotten fucked when the Islamic people decided that the actions of one paper represented the whole country, America doesn't operate in such an official manner. One person/paper/thing doesn't represent all of us unless they're acting in an official capacity. I read the cartoon thread, too. What Postman is arguing is that in an official capacity (what the soldiers were), we shouldn't burn religious symbols. If these soldiers were off-duty, they should be able to. We should certainly have the freedom to burn religious symbols (and we do) but there are irresponsible ways of exercising those freedoms. By allowing a constitutional amendment to get rid of flag burning, you're stripping a civilian of their right to show displeasure with their own nation. They can still burn religious symbols but now if they try to burn an American flag, they're committing a crime. So while they can commit racist speech on their own time, they can't speak against the country. Roger dodger, cowboy?

Is that all you've got? Please.

Everything you post is garbage. Your posts are unfounded, your arguments are puerile and your grasp of debate is laughable. While Postman may have a differeing opinion than you, he is certainly addressing these points and countering them. Everything that you post is shit. Stop posting, read a book and get some opinions with a factual basis. You know what? Let me reiterate that. STOP POSTING Postman isn't necessarily right. RD isn't necessarily right. In issues of foreign policy, there is no objective or empirical right. But you are wrong. You are uninformed and ignorant. You have contributed nothing to this discussion. Go reread Postman's long and what was presumed to be his final post in this thread. It wraps everything said into a nice little package and shows a very complex and well-informed understanding of the situation. While it isn't necessarily my own feelings on the topic, it is a very well-reasoned and logical argument. I'm staying out of this thread for the most part. While I have the gist of the history of the middle east, I'm not nearly as informed on the topic as I'd like to be. Oh, one more thing. STOP POSTING.

Because we have an Att. Gen. that referred to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint." Holy crap, that sounds like an answer to a relevant question. Are you sure that was Gonzales saying that? You must have caught him on the third week of the third month of a leap year because for as far as I know, he doesn't answer relevant questions.

If we're in a war, how come they aren't accorded POW rights?

Then you have no basis for discussing philosophy.

Eh, it's quick and dirty mainly because I don't feel like digging in ProQuest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism Divine Command Theory says that God decided what good and evil was. Utilitarianism says that something that doesn't maximize happiness is evil. Egoism says there is no evil.

Wrong. Neither Dembski nor Behe support it. E-mails subpoenaed in Kitzmiller V. Dover prove it. Wrong. This one stems from your ignorance about the Big Bang Theory. The big bang theory wasn't a singularity exploding. The big bang was energy turning into matter. Something big "just didn't explode" into lots of little things. Matter coalesced out of energy. That's why it's not symmetrical, that's why there is no exact center of the universe, that's why we have energy forms we still don't understand. Wait, wait, there's an equation for this, hang on. Oh, right. E=MC^2. Energy = Matter times the Speed of Light squared. Ever wonder why we get energy from fusion? The process spits out a positron which combines with an electron, eliminating each other's mass in a huge outpouring of energy. NASA was already revamped back in the 90's. Does the mantra "Faster, better, cheaper" mean anything to you? What? No, seriously, what?

It's one of those cases where intelligent design hides behind vaguery. While intelligent design never explicity mentions the bible or Christ, Kitzmiller V. Dover showed that the motives of those behind intelligent design meant to do so.

Psychological consequentialism has been laughed out of both psychological and philosophical academic communities because eventually it resorts to a ridiculous amount of circular logic and logical fallacies.

Thank God we have the Judicial system to weed out garbage like intelligent design. Having had the opportunity to see Eugenie Scott speak and having had to do legislative research on it myself, I'll do a quick rundown of what happened and the reasons why they did throw ID out in Kitzmiller V Dover. The creationist movement fell flat on its face in 1987 with the Edwards V. Aguillard case that reached the Supreme Court. In that case, Creationism was declared unconstitutional because it failed the Lemmon Test (a test that determines if legislation had a background that violated the establishment clause of the 1st amendment). Well, obviously, that sent Creationists into a bit of a scramble because now they had no obvious recourse to keep God in schools. Thus, everything switched over to intelligent design. Through subpoenaed manuscripts, we can see that even the major Creationist texts (most notably Of Pandas and People) suddenly switched over to Intelligent Design. In the 1986 version of Of Pandas and People, the word Creationists was mentioned 87 times. In 1987, the phrase "Intelligent Design Proponents" was mentioned 90 with some overlap. In Kitzmiller V. Dover, multiple uses of "Crintelligent Designists" was noted. Then they examined the two basic theories of intelligent design, created in 1995 and 1997. The two cornerstones of intelligent design are irreducible complexity and specified complexity, both of which are extensions of Paley's Watchmaker argument put forth in his 19th century text "Natural Theology." In it, he states that if you find a watch in a field, it must have a creator. Likewise, both irreducible and specified complexity state this as well. Irreducible complexity states that such objects in nature are so complex that removing any one piece would result in them not working. Specified complexity states that the odds of such things occurring naturally are incredibly low, thus they must have had a designer. Both of these arguments do nothing but strawman evolution. Luckily, the Judicial system weeded this garbage out. Now that the ID guys have a bad legal precedent, we might see the end of this battle in science's favor soon.

Bush once again shows nepotism trumps experience. Starting with Brown in FEMA and now Deutsch in NASA, these political appointees are simply ridiculous. Granted, while every president is allowed a great deal of political appointees, 24 year olds shouldn't be appointed to positions of this much power, much the same as an Arabian horse judge shouldn't be appointed to the head emergency office in this country. Additionally, this is a major blow against objective science. Big bang theory is the predominant theory- mainly because it's backed up by a ridiculous amount of evidence. We've got the 3 degree kelvin background radiation, the huge amounts of redshift from every object in the universe and we've got particles popping in and out of the residual energy from the big bang. We have no evidence of intelligent design or of anything that would remotely question the big bang theory. Science isn't a democracy. It's a republic. Our theories are elected by scientists who rely on massive amounts of data. The fact that this can be undermind by some pissant barely out of college that can't tell a rocket ship from a crucifix is disgusting.