Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

As I said, Gandalf, it's one reason but not the only reason. According to a couple of American teachers I know, the whole system is broken down and nothing short of razing it to the ground and rebuilding it from scratch is really going to make much difference.

Underfunding, too big class size, teaching rote memorization instead of understanding and knowledge of the subject, incompetent teachers being protected by unions, NCLB, nncompetent administrators and teachers not being able to hold kids back for failing grades (for various reasons,one of which is the bull**** self-esteem argument) are all parts of the problem. This subject is so complex it needs its own thread, really. When I have a bit more time (at work right now), I'll look up a few good threads on SDnet and link those, because they have a far more accurate and indepth analysis of the situation.

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

Edi I was referring to the assembly held at the Bold High School a couple of weeks ago where the guest speakers promoted gay sex, masturbation, and drug use. I was not making a statement for or against gay parenting. A parent is a parent.

As to the Bolder HS issue, while many found the assembly to be a slap in the face of moral and ethical standards, many liberal parents felt that it was a ground breaking event and not only endorsed further similar assemblies, but congratulated the school for holding the first one. Tell me that you as a parent wouldn't be a bit miffed by some stranger telling your kid that s/he should engage in same sex relationships, do drugs, and masturbate? Correct me if I am wrong, but where does this fall into educating our children?

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

Ah, the confusion clears somewhat. Your post wasn't too clear on that point, so it lent itself to being misread.

As far as what I as a parent (if I was one) would be comfortable with:
Giving kids a good sex education. That does not mean telling them to engage in homosexual sex. Sex education means making sure that they know about the risks involved in unprotected sex, measures how to counter those risks and also about the emotional aspects related to it. With the stress being on "only when you feel you're ready for it". If the issue of homosexual relationships comes up, why would those be any worse than a normal one, because a straight person is not going to seek one out. Where masturbation is concerned, it is something that comes to humans naturally, so there is nothing wrong with that and it should not be labeled as something evil.

Drugs, that's a different issue altogether, as I said, and I have a fairly hardline stance about using drugs.

It's just that for some reason Americans have some completely unnatural need to roll drugs, sex education and homosexual relationships all into one as if they could not be dealt with separately, which is where one gets the kind of ridiculous strawmen and black/white fallacies that often crop up around this issue. If the speaker promoted all three, did he do so unconditionally? If he did not, his speech should be analyzed for its merits and demerits instead of dismissed entirely.

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

A very odd thing happened, A guy on the radio this morning, during a debate about the Boulder HS issue, commented that he believes that "Left wing liberals are todays anti-Christs."

He went on in some detail and actually made some sense from his point of view. That being a religious man and all.

This started to make me wonder, while I believe that there is far more good out there than evil, evil often prevails. But believe it or not, evil is in the eye of the beholder. One mans evil is another mans good and vise versa.

Some people believe that because "they" don't like something, that everyone else should be forced not to like it too. That belief, that our way is the best way, which is a fundamental edict of the liberal left philosophy, is something that I do not believe in and could never subscribe to. To me to force your beliefs onto others is an evil. However to educate others as to your beliefs and then allow them to make the choice for themselves as to whether or not they accept them, well that is good. Taking away a persons right to choose for themselves what they want to believe and then forcing them to accept it is an evil. Allowing a person to excerise their constitutional rights is a good, denying them the right to have rights is an evil.

Liberals love to to tell people what rights they should and shouldn't have. That is an evil. They want to re-write the constitution and do away with such things as the worthless second amendment, redefine and clarify the meaning of the first amendment, and devalue the worth of our Republic by demising that which makes us unique. That is an evil.

They want to break down the moral and ethical boundaries of our society by forcing parents out of the role of role model and giving that position to the Government. The government should teach our young how to behave, how to think, and what to do. This has been tried before and I need not say where because we all know the historical out come of many of those examples.

When I was growing up school was tough, my parents spanked me when I misbehaved, my friends and I could horse play, play cow boys and Indians, cops and robbers, and generally felt safe and happy. It was ok to go to Sunday school and play baseball. To walk to the store a mile away from home, and to ride in the openness of the back of my dads pick up truck.

Now school is anything but tough, well you can't hug your friends any more, unless your gay of course. Parents no longer have the right to enforce proper discipline upon their ill behaving young. Now they must give them a time out, negotiate with them, and try to get them to understand what they did wrong. Wanna guess how these kids turn out when they throw a temper tantrum because mommy won't buy them a new toy and all she can do is "talk" to them? We have all seen them in the stores and we have all thought the same thought.. don't deny it. Appropriate and measured discipline, including the reserved and aptly applied use of spanking will yield far better results than the politically correct handcuffed way that parents are now forced to employ. Spoiled undisciplined children often grow up to be rude and nasty adults that society then blames the parents for. Never mind the fact that they were bound by law not to discipline their child, it is still their fault that their kid grew up to become a drug using, anti-social, criminal.

Forget about horse playing or games like cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, that isn't politically correct any more and is generally frowned upon. In fact if you even make gun with your fingers at school, many school will call the police under their zero tolerance policy. (Yet they still allow kids to call fat kids fat, and dumb kids dumb....)

It is now become politically incorrect to send your child to Sunday school because the many liberals believe that it is the first step by the religious right to indoctrinate your child into their cult. You cannot even wish someone a merry Christmas now because it offends a few non christens. And look out, the ACLU will sue any school if they try to put on a Christmas or easter play. It is hard to deny that the word God has become the new dirty word in the liberal left vocabulary. To many of them, only dumb souther hicks and self righteous anti-womens right to choose zealots believe in God. No one should ever be embarrassed to say that they believe in God or subscribe to a religion of their choice.

Baseball has been replaced by TV, X-Box and playstation. God help us if we try to get our young to go outside and play. I mean how can a parent compete with the advertising onslaught of todays consumer driven world?

No parent in their right mind would let their kids walk a mile to the local store because of all the sicko's and child molesters out there. (Not to mention that the local store is no more than likely next door in what used to be the huge open hay field of farmer Jo.) What have we become that we now must fear our neighbors so? And where did all of these sick, creepy, child molesting, kidnapping SOB's come from? LA perhaps? And why must I hear about them each and every night on the news?

Heaven forbid if you get caught letting your kids ride in the back of your truck today. You'll end up with a one way ticket to jail and your kids will be on their way to "protective" foster care. Your face will be plastered all over the tattle tale news as the "evil parent" pervert of the day. You'll be divorced by your wife, be shunned by your neighbors, fired from your job, loose your home, go bankrupt, do jail if not prison time, loose all your rights, and only get to see your kids after you paid all your back child support and passed all of the state mandated child care classes. And then you'll only be able to see them on altering Sundays once every four months or so.

One mans evil is another mans good. Its all a matter of your point of view.

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

That's a completely distorted, head-buried-up-the-neck-in-rectum strawman of the politically liberal position. It's a completely delusional caricature mostly perpetrated by conservatives who have, if they are lucky, perhaps one working synapse.

The position of most liberals (aside from the second amendment, which I will exclude, it is a separate issue that follows a slightly different divide) is that unless you can show how something is objectively harmful, the government or the community has no business banning it by law or butting its nose in. This is a marked contrast to the position of many conservatives, especially religious conservatives, who seem to think that their values should be forced down everybody's throat, with the full force of the state if at all possible.

The idea that liberals want to remove parental responsibilities and turn them over to government is nothing but a fever dream. Do you have any idea of how much that would cost and how much damage it would do? Outlawing spanking is very different from taking parental rights away. Most proponents of spanking like the "good old days" excuse when it was okay to beat your kids black and blue, but it's not. That's assault, and because the target is a dependent and unable to do anything about it, it is especially heinous. There are other ways of disciplining kids than hitting them. If parents are so damned spineless that they give in to all of their kid's whims, the fault is with the parent, not the kid.

It is up to the parent to decide how to raise their kids mainly, and Sunday school is a perfectly acceptable part of that. So are other religious activities. It does not mean that such activities should be protected from criticism if there are objective flaws about them.

As for getting kids to go outside vs playing on the X-Box, well, the parent has the right to take the X-Box away and make the kid go outside and tough crap, the kid needs to deal with that. The parent is the one in control, not the kid, and it looks more and more like this whole rant of yours is nothing but a collection of conservative soundbites that are so ludicrously bizarre that whoever came up with them was ingesting seriously illegal mind-altering substances.

The US as a whole needs to grow a spine, your nation looks like a washed-out drunk beating its chest about how bad-*** it used to be and blaming everything on others instead of taking a long hard look in the mirror. Most European countries are seriously more liberal than America and we don't have these social problems to the degree that you do. How the hell do you explain that FACTUAL OBSERVATION?

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

I wish it were crap Edi, I really do, but more and more people are beginning to buy into the liberals media controlled onslaught of propaganda and are showing inherent and somewhat alarming signs of conforming to the views and political agenda's of the elite far left liberal doctrine.

To be honest I have never seen any religious right wing conservative try to force their beliefs down my throat. However I have bared witness to liberals throwing break fluid on SUV's, stringing up razor think fishing wire on dirt bike trails, aggressive anti-war protests, and personally have been verbally attacked by liberals for not agreeing with how they see the world. I was "let go" from my position with the City because I wasn't a Democrat and didn't "accept" my supervisors very liberal point of view of how things should be. (I made the mistake of saying I voted for Bush Sr. in 92 back in may of 93 and was removed from the schedule and told that I no longer fit in. WTF!)

So you see I do have first hand knowledge of how liberals operate. If you don't agree with them, they do their best to marginalize, harass, intimidate, and pressure you to conform to their will, if you don't, they embarrass you, ridicule you, and ultimately resort to just doing just about anything they can to quiet you. (Much like what you are attempting to do Edi. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif )

In 20 years I haven't seen very many conservatives pull these kind of tactics. And those who have, often see it blow back in their faces.

And for the record, we are not a washed out drunk beating our chest about how bad *** we are, we are in fact a nation that has saved Europe first from the Nazi's and secondly from Stalins Russia. If you want to call us a spoiled rotten 15 year waving a gun in everyones face or a drunk beating his chest, please keep in mind that you all would be speaking German or Russian right now if it weren't for us dumb yanks and our bad bass ways. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

As to our social problems, well they can pretty much be summed up in one word; Television.

When you rely on TV to teach your children morals and ethics, you reap what you sow.

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

The control parents had has been dramatically reduced by liberal ideals and liberal back passage of liberal laws. If your child refuses to obey you, and you take away their X-box and turn off the TV, they simply have to pick up the phone and call 911 and say that mommy hit me. Most parents are scared to death of this and most kids know about it.

Liberals have taken the power that the parents once held and gave it to the children. This is no lie, it isn't propaganda, it is fact and it is ugly.

Abuse is not acceptable. My parents spanked me, they never abused me. I suspect that that is true for most people. People who abuse their children are the lowest forms of life known to exist.

And Edi, comments like these really do more harm than good as they prove a point. When people disagree with a liberal point of view they are attacked, ridiculed, harassed, intimidated, and marginalized. Now I know that you are a passionate advocate of your position and enjoy a good debate, but please bare in mind that when you resort to personal attacks, you loose the high ground and forfeit the moral values of your position, whatever those might be.

Attacking an idea or philosophy is one thing, but attacking a person because of those ideas and philosophies is something else entirely. Please keep it civil and don't flame people.

Thanks man. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

This claim about the US media being controlled by liberals is a flat out lie. It cannot be formulated any more charitably than that. If the media really were as liberal as conservative scaremongers portray it, they would have dragged the Bush administration and the Republican party over the coals for dozens of scandals and the whole runup to the Iraq war, but what we have seen instead is practical media fellation of conservative and neoconservative viewpoints. It might look "left-wing" from where you are, but from anywhere else, the American media is in the far right wingnut looney-land.

You personally, or in general? Because they tend to do iyt via legislation. Know what they have been up to in some of the midwest states? Those gay marriage bans they rammed through the legislation? They've been using those as a legal springboard to sue companies and government to prevent any kind of benefits being given to heterosexual couples who are not married, though cohabiting couples (I think the term is called common law marriage or some such) have been able to claim them before. Now, they use the argument that unless there is actual, official marriage, nothing can be given. That's ramming their values down people's throats, plain and simple.

How about Focus on Family and other religious right groups trying to get abortion banned? That's ramming their values down everyone else's throats too. Same thing with the morons who in Alabama voted to keep interracial marriages illegal a couple of years ago. There 40% support for keeping it illegal, fortunately not enough for the racist idiots. Or what about the religious right wing people who want to enforce dead-letter laws against homosexual sex so that gays can be thrown in prison for consensual sex? That isn't forcing their values down anyone's throat? I can keep these examples up all day unless you care to actually provide evidence for your claims.


So, all liberals are criminals, eh? So all right wingers and conservatives must then be abortion clinic bombers or Timothy McVeigh sympathizers? Sounds like we can have a deal on swapping labels then. You want to tag all liberals with the extremist brush, I have no problem returning the favor tenfold, Atrocities. The activities above are criminal, pure and simple. Vandalism and intent to cause injury, so throw the book at them and good riddance. That is most definitely not typical liberal behavior.

What do you mean by aggressive anti-war protests? Protests that got out of control or just people being vocal and possibly heckling counter-protesters? Because I've also seen news reports about pro-war counter-protesters getting violent.

Do you consider this debate a verbal attack? If you do not agree with someone's world view and cannot offer up actual reasoning to back up your disagreement, you most definitely are not immune from criticism. I have no problem verbally attacking people whose worldview I disagree with if I have an actual reason for doing so. Which means that I let e.g. racists, xenophobes, misogynists, bullies and jingoists have it with a full broadside and if they get upset over that, I'll tell them to go screw themselves. If they want to piss and moan about it, they can then bloody well come up with actual logical reasoning to back up their bull**** or they can shut up.

That's a different thing. It's baseless dismissal and abuse, and if it had happened here, you could sue them and they would leave court with their backside very sore. Sadly, I've heard this kind of news from the US several times, though most of them have been the opposite, e.g. people being fired because they had a Kerry campaign sticker on their car when their boss was a Republican. Neither instance is justified if the person does his job and does not cause disruption in the workplace.

Take a look at how your country has been run the past 6½ years and see if this isn't the pot calling the kettle black. There are ****wits on the left too, always have been, just they have always existed on the right, but what I have seen you do here is take a sampling of the extremists of the left wing and people who have abused their position to fire you and you have then painted everyone non-conservative with the same brush. That's called a hasty generalization fallacy. I've pointed out why those hasty generalizations are not accurate and you can provide evidence to the contrary if you wish.

Calling those hasty generalizations delusional is accurate if you're trying to apply them to everyone liberal. IF you only want to talk about the extremists and arseholes who are willing to commit crimes and vandalism, you're on target. They're a vanishingly small fringe, actually.

Perhaps, but in recent years it has become common practice for the right wing to use all kinds of smear tactics against liberals, harass, belittle etc and there has been no blowback at all. Fox "News" and it's "fair and balanced" approach is nothing but a right wing propaganda channel and can get away with all of that behavior with no backlash at all, and the Republican party has been doing it on an unprecedented scale for the whole Bush term.

Ah, the old staple argument about how us Europeans should be grateful to the US. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

You should take a good look at your history books before attempting to use that on a Finn. You did not save us from anything in WW2. In fact, you helped our enemies all through the war by providing material support that allowed them to be more effective and it was the Germans who helped save us from suffering the fate of the Balts and being annexed to Russia. Yeah, they sold us out in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop deal, but they helped us out in 1941 and onward and some Luftwaffe units were pretty instrumental in helping the Finnish army slow the Russian advance through the Karelian Isthmus, which eventually forced Stalin to the negotiating table to make peace so he could be the first to rush to Berlin. No thanks to the US at all.

There is no condoning what Nazi Germany did, the Holocaust and the other brutalities, but at the end of the day it was Nazi Germany that helped keep my country free, not the Allies, and that fact of history must be acknowledged.

See above.

That is not exactly the fault of the TV, but the fault of the parents who think that the TV can raise the child for them. Such parents are lazy and irresponsible. It is a parent's job to raise a child and there is no abrogating that responsibility.

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

By the time the kid is old enough to understand a method of blackmail that sophisticated, the damage has already been done. If you raise your kid right and enforce discipline from the get-go, this possibility will not even manifest. Most kids love their parents (unless the parents are actually abusive scumbags) and would not want to hurt them. I've heard stories from some Americans I know how they have no problem controlling their kids at all and this thing has never come up even as a possibility.

I would like to see evidence of this unsupported claim. I will not accept it as a statement of fact at face value. AS I said, by the time it gets to that point, the parents have already failed.

The problem is that there are far fewer people who subscribe to your point of view than not, and even fewer who would actually know when to stop. Just the past two years, I've seen several news reports about small children being beaten for not being quiet or other trivial reasons. Many of those kids died and there are more cases where there were several injuries. Simply put, the people most likely to have children are the ones with the least education and who are the least equipped to be good parents and they also have more children on average and they are, simply put, too incompetent at being parents to allow any kind of leeway with spanking. It would be irresponsible in the extreme to not ban spanking for that reason. At least if it is criminalized, you can throw child-abusing scumbags in prison without unnecessary complications.

Only when the opponent thinks that the substance of what is said can be ignored in favor of the way it is said. Style over substance is a logical fallacy. The comments are accurate in the sense that the views you expressed in the post I replied to are in no way grounded in reality. I've seen many of the same arguments from others who were, unlike you, completely unable to understand any of the counterarguments at all, whether framed civilly or using far harsher language than in those quotes.

I can also attest to being harassed and ridiculed for advocating moderate positions in opposition to conservative ones, even on forums that are known to be liberal places. The runup to the Iraq war particularly stands out in that respect. Unfortunately for the people doing it, I have no problem dishing it out in kind, so they generally got the worst of it.

I know. I'm well aware of the difference between attacking an idea and attacking the messenger. Saying "Idea x is stupid for reasons 1, 2 & 3 and therefore people who support it are stupid" is not attacking the messenger even though it may sound rude to some, but saying "Person x is stupid, therefore anything he says is wrong" is an ad hominem with no logical basis. It's just that too many people think that using any bad words automatically means an ad hominem.

I also know that you are, despite your obviously very conservative views, capable of understanding the arguments and you also seem to enjoy debate, so don't take the harsh words in my first post as an attack on yourself. They are attacks on ideas, not on you. I don't know why you have such views, but based on the evidence at hand, I would say it is due to bad experiences with some liberals, definitely bad experiences due to criminal left-wing extremists and some corrupt organizations (whether local government or something else) and possibly also lack of exposure to mainstream moderate liberals.

I happen to think you're a swell guy. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
I just don't let that get in the way of blasting a position I think is factually incorrect.

Funny as it may sound, in Finland I am counted as a conservative. In the US, I'd be pretty damned left-wing, that's how far to the right the entire US political spectrum is. I do not know if liberal would be an accurate term for me in the context of US politics, or even here, "progressive" would fit better.

Re: GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!
 

Hey Edi, looks like we have seriously high jacked this thread. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

You make some very good points and while I don't really want to get into a debate counter debate over each and every individual point I would like to offer some comments about a few of them.

The media is in the business of entertainment. They do what they do to drum up ratings. When the media is controlled by a few power mongers, be they righties or lefties, the message becomes skewed. When they own the information, they can bend it any way they want. That is true about any media, public or government controlled. Ours is just in the business to sell advertising time. Whatever truth brings in the most revenue is the holly grail of the day.

In every state that had a bill up for voter approval regarding gay marriage the voters turned it down. Nearly everyone agrees that gay couples should have the same exact legal rights as strait couples. And thankfully in every bill that was turned down by the voters wasn't about gay rights, it was about gay marriage. The voting public has spoken, they support equal legal rights, but not gay marriage. This debate over the term marriage will go on for many years before it is finally resolved.

There is a difference between a spirited debate and verbal attack. Much like there is a difference between attacking the person over the idea. Calling a person a name directly is considered a verbal attack. Stating that, for example, republicans or liberals are dumb, isn't a personal attack. In that sense you are attacking the ideals of a group and not an individual. While you could say that Republicans suck, it doesn't mean the same thing as saying to someone that "you suck."

I love how the liberals here in the states and across the world keep proving my point for me. If you don't tout the liberal left line, your attacked, harassed, called names, and so on. If this isn't true, then why all the hate for Fox News? Look at MSNBC and how they are. Do you see any liberals attacking Keith Olbermann now do you? Come on, if Fox News was such a propaganda machine, then why is it that they dominate cable news? They quite literally blow MSNBC out of the water day in and day out. If they are just a propaganda wing for the right wing republican conservatives then why do they hold dominion over MSNBC and all of the cable news networks? Simple truth, more people identify with the Fox News and the truth than they do with left wing liberal bias in the media.

I personally don't think they are a propaganda channel Edi, in fact I do think they are exactly what they claim to be, fair and balanced and to be honest it would seem that many, if not all, dedicated left wing liberals sincerely hate them for it. I state this as a fact and point at the evident manor in which the left wing liberals have constantly been bombarding Fox News with attack after attack. This level of left wing liberal hypocrisy is actually quite funny when you sit right down and think about it. They love MSNBC, but hate Fox News.

There is no doubt that you Finn's are some tough son's a bi***es. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I know its old staple arguement, but it is a valid one. Times change and no matter what happens between us we both know that come a ligitimate fight, we would all stand together as we have in the past. Like they say, America might be full of idiots, but they are our idiots. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif We feel the same way about our European brothers. We fight and bicker but come hell or high water, we are friends.

I agree with you Edi, 100%. Absolutely correct.

I should clarify that comment by adding to the beginning of that sentence these words "I believe."

I wish I could prove this to you Edi but I cannot. It would be akin to attempting to prove that God exists. All I can say is that the prevailing emotional feeling of many folks, Republican and Democrat, is that too many fundamental parental rights are being circumvented by an elite few who believe that their way is better. This is a sad and ugly truth, and one that most parents will doggedly resist. But the push toward taking the right of the parents to raise their children by their own moral code and standards is slowly being eroded by an insidiously insistent drive toward giving those rights directly to the schools and law makers.

I feel, and this is pure speculation on my part, that there is a real tangible and active on going threat to undermine our very way of life in that when you can control what a child is tough, you can control the child and by the transitive properties of nature, you gain control of society when those children come of age. Indoctrinate them while they are young to believe in nothing and you weaken them as adults and make them pliable for control throughout their lives. Insert your favorite bad guy into the formula and you have a recipe for totalitarianism. But then again WTF do I know? This could all just be research material for book I am writing. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I sincerely do not have any problem with any one calling my ideas flawed and or using colorful terminology to do so. But I do have a concern when someone attacks me personally. I genuinely like to keep an open mind about things. I want people to prove my points of view wrong if they can. That is what is so absolutely wonderful about a free society, the fair exchange of ideas. Prove me wrong and I will tell you, but please do it with your argument, not with angry or hateful words.

Edi you are indeed a solid debater with skill and genuine passion. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif