Politics
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- raf0
TBO, it is because you might have a skewed view of what democracy is. You want it to be what it says it is, while democracy is something else.
It is the same with a lot of things, ie. religion. There is a Polish conservative politician whom I like to quote, he says:
"I am a Catholic. Not because it is about turning the other cheek. It is because it was the most expansively contending religion in history which never turned the other cheek, thanks to which our culture is still the most prominent out there and we are here and now"
Democracy is exactly the same. It is about many things, but not about empowering common people which it says it is about.
It is about giving them the illusion of power.Now, the parallel to Catholicism gets interesting, because spreading "American style freedom" is a replay of the same thing all over again: a crusade.
It is about spreading a dominant culture and pillaging. This time, it is a new religion you shall have no others before: democracy.Also this time, while remote countries get schooled (very interestingly, the same ones which were crusaded centuries ago), there is also a new pillagee in town: the taxpayer paying for it all, who gets anally raped unbeknownst to him.
But is is new? Pretty sure the common man paid for crusades in the middle ages as well...
- note: by Catholicism I actually mean a larger scope, Christianity.raf
- TheBlueOne0
Raf I think you're engaging in what Socrates referred to as a "sophistry". Democracy is both idea and a practice. You might be right saying that democracy in practice has a lot to be desired, might be used by other powers for their own ends, but that doesn't change the essential nature that democracy is rule by the people. It is exactly about empowering the people. If that gets twisted y other ends, well , that's about rubber meeting road, but still doesn't change the definition of what democracy is.
- DrBombay0
Florida Senate Democrat Candidate
http://www.jeffgreene.com/?no_sp…Aboard his yacht in 2006
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.co…
- drgz0
US ofA, as I see it, compressed into a video
- drgz0
Also, obesity up 1.1%, not bad
http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressre…
- luckyorphan0
The Charitable-Giving Divide
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/2…"....the exceptional philanthropy of the superwealthy few doesn’t apply to the many more people defined as rich in the current debate over the Bush tax cuts — individuals earning over $200,000 and couples with revenues over $250,000. For decades, surveys have shown that upper-income Americans don’t give away as much of their money as they might and are particularly undistinguished as givers when compared with the poor, who are strikingly generous. A number of other studies have shown that lower-income Americans give proportionally more of their incomes to charity than do upper-income Americans. In 2001, Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization focused on charitable giving, found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes; those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent."
- Yet again...no response from the conservatives on this thread.luckyorphan
- TheBlueOne0
Black guy wearing Under Armour Beanie and Puerto Rican necklace mobbed by lily white crowd for looking muslimish:
I like the guy in the crowd who yells "I bet he voted for Obama!"
My favorite part is right around 2:00 when someone says, “they’re trying to make us look like racists.” Nope, I think you did a decent job of that all by yourselves.
By the way, the guy is a carpenter who was on his way to his job at Ground Zero site building the Freedom Tower.
- BonSeff0
- Sounded like a song from Team America World Police.DrBombay
- OMFGRamanisky2
- They'll turn 911 into a mockary. You had your republicon government to thank for that!74LEO
- DrBombay0
Go pray at ur Muslin Mosks!
- cerberus0
Why don't these fucking idiots go protest the other mosques that are in the same area and have been there for years?
- DrBombay0
It is called a wedge issue and people eat that shit up. Mostly because they are fucking retarded. It isn't even a mosque but it has been called a mosque for weeks. Goes to show you that the shit isn't real.
- ukit0
Some background on the people behind the "mosque"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/1…
Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.
Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.
Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.
For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.
The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.
While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.
- ukit0
That's what bothered me about this from the beginning. Its a wedge issue, same kind of nationalist bullshit Republicans used to shove the Patriot Act through, not to mention keep the War in Iraq going for years. And look at the right wingers in this thread eat it up. Sad.
- ukit0
Now wait for someone to show up and tell us both sides are wrong...I guess there must be a sensible midpoint between rational thinking and uninformed racism/ bigotry.
- BonSeff0
there are much bigger problems in the world
http://www.latimes.com/news/nati…
- drgz0
A black man,who is mistaken for a muslim, experiences a scary moment at the Ground Zero protest
- ********0
mccain loses all that matters
