Uh-oh

[Weltall]

Originally posted by A Black Falcon
I don't know if I really want to get into this because these are issues which really can end pretty badly... they have more realworld meaning than videogames... Plus, no one here seems to be on my side and its tough to be the only one defending your side of the argument. Why is everyone here who cares about politics seem to be conservative? :(

Because Conservatism... yunno... makes sense. Liberalism is one of those things that looks good in theory and tends to end with failure in practice. Like Communism and socialism. Liberalism is a defunct system given real birth by FDR and nurtured by Hippies. The good ideals of liberalism are always marred by the race/class envy they blame Conservatives for.

As you can guess I pretty much completely disagree with just about everything the three of you said. I don't know if going in depth is worth the time, though, because it'll just lead to more long arguments and no change in the world of anyone changing their minds. Oh well.

Still... how can you seriously say that environmental protection doesn't do any good? That's such a stupid (and classic for rightwingers) position that its impossible to argue... if you insist it you can, but it doesn't mean that it has any relation to what is going on with the environment in the real world...

Of course, Bush is doing his best (and given this political climate, making progress in) getting rid of as much of it as he can to help his corporate buddies. Its really terrible and will onlyl lead to more clearcut oldgrowth forests, irreversable damage to the ecosystem, etc, but there's nothing that can be done... the stupid people who allowed conservatives to control the whole government by, for some bizarre reason, thinking that which party is in power doesn't matter are really to blame. As we're seeing it clearly does...

The typical leftwinger position is that we're on the verge of destroying the world, despite much evidence to the contrary. While enviro-nuts piss and moan about global warming being our fault, a single normal-sized volcanic eruption causes more damage to the ozone layer than humans have in our entire industrialized history... and yet even though Volcanic eruptions have been happening a few billion years, we still have an ozone layer completely intact. And despite the fact that we've been able to take scientifically accurate global temperature readings for all of a half-century, enviro-nuts seem convinced that this period of global warming couldn't possibly be natural... even though evidence shows climate shifts of even greater magnitude have occured sequentially for billions of years. Nature does far more damage to this planet than we do, and the Earth always recovers. We're not, short of total nuclear holocaust, even remotely capable of destroying the entire world due to pollution.

Affirmative action? I was really hoping that after the whole Trent Lott thing, Bush would grow part of a brain and at least PRETEND to make attempts to not alienate the entire black vote. However, he then goes and attacks affirmative action and nominates super right wing judges. Great. Way to show that your party is exactly where we all know it is: for the rich white men only... Er, rich white Republican men...

Let me answer that by quoting Martin Luther King Jr. from his famous "I have a dream" speech, my favorite line, in fact:

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Wow, look at that. Dr. King, the most famous civil-rights activist in American history, was opposed to affirmative action. Not only is affirmative action simply reverse-discrimination aimed at Asians and Whites, it's insulting to those it claims to help. It insinuates that black people, hispanic people, and other minorities (except Asians, AA does not help them at all) are not smart enough to be successful on their own. It's a goddamn shame when the color of your skin is a more important factor to you getting a job or college admission than is your skills, training and work history. I agree fully with Dr. King, every person who applies for college or a job should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I am a white male. If I applied for a job, and a black man got the job instead of me, I would be happier if that black man was chosen over me because he was more qualified for the job than I am, not just because he's black and I'm not. Can you honestly say that's fair? Is it fair even to an unqualified black person to give him a job he can't handle and will lose in six months because while he didn't have the proper training and skills for the job, he still got it by virtue of his skin color?

Affirmative action, liberals say, is the best way to right the wrongs of segregation. So what you, and your ilk are saying is that discrimination is okay as revenge? That's what AA is. And it's harmful and damaging to minorities, because it creates, or rather adds to the vicitimization culture black people in particular suffer from. It's a stupid, worthless, and utterly insulting practice that I will cheer for it's death until the day it happens.

That stupid tax cut proposal sure helps prove that one, if anyone needed any convincing because they haven't been reading the papers or watching the news for several years. Hmm, lets see... a dividends tax cut which will help super rich people and major corporations only. Getting rid of the estate tax, which will help super rich people only. And more like that. Gee, I wonder who he is catering his programs to... I wonder...

Typical liberal class-warfare bullshit. The richest 1% of America pay almost 20% of all taxes the federal government collects, far more disproportionate to income than the other 99%! Poor people, those who get all sorts of free breaks like welfare, disability and social security DO NOT PAY TAXES, AT ALL, ON THAT INCOME. The poorest people pay the LEAST taxes to begin with! In fact, they're the recipients of almost all the tax money that goes out to social welfare programs! For God's sake, don't be so dense! And when the rich get tax cuts, that enables prices on commercial goods and services to decrease, and jobs and wages to increase, which ultimately benefits everyone, especially the poor.

As for oil drilling in Anwar, its a less major issue but still is major because it represents something -- more government destruction of national parks and forests, just like all the logging that the administration is now increasing in other oldgrowth national forests. Good for corporate profits, bad for the ecology of the region, planet, etc... and for the future of wild spaces and national parks and places for freedom from clearcutting and building that national parks and stuff are supposed to be...

Don't lower gas prices benefit the poorest people best? Oh, I forgot: wild animals are more important than people. Sorry.

Iraq. I just don't see how ANYONE can think that Bush honestly has created this war (I'll face it... with Bush in charge, we never had a chance of NOT having a war in Iraq, 9/11 or no... it just gave him a 'better' reason...) over "terrorism". If it truly was, he'd be going after TERRORISTS. He's not... real terrorists elsewhere are ignored while he focuses all his energies on a nation that not only doesn't have nuclear weapons (or proof of a currently operational nuclear weapons program), but isn't even funding terrorists (except for Palestine, but all the Arab countries, including many US "Allies", are doing that so that's not a decent reason unless we go to war with, say, Saudi Arabia too...). Yeah, its over terrorism. Sure. And it has NOTHING to do with Bush wanting to make up for daddy's mistake of leaving Sadaam alive, or to give the big oil campaign donors access to one of the world's biggest oil fields. SUUURE. At least Germany, France, Russia, China, and 70% of the American public (I'd give a link to the poll, but don't remember where. I know its accurate... 30% of the people support us going to war by ourself. Its around 70 or 80% with UN support, though.) agree and say that war really isn't the right thing to start considering until diplomacy has been worked through and the UN authorizes another declaration against Iraq... which, if indications are right, France, Russia, and/or China well might block. So Bush is forced to go to war with only Tony Blair (not the British people... they are even more against our own war than Americans...) backing him up. Of course, given this IS Bush, I'm sure he'll go in anyway... I wish he had a brain and would follow legal channels like almost every other major world leader does, but no luck.

Bottom line: Iraq broke UN resolutions repeatedly. Therefore war is fully justified. And that the UN seems to be perfectly complacent with it's own statutes being violated is proof that the entire organization is useless. The fact that historically the UN has almost never been effective notwithstanding, the US and Great Britain are the only UN Members who give a damn about enforcing it's rules and regulations, and we comprise just about the UN's entire military force. We are the only useful members in the organization. The rest of them are pitiful, decadently-socialist pantywaste nations who are socially bankrupt, economically invisible and militarily nonexistent, and who want to continue the policy of appeasement that did France and Britain a great deal of good when they did the same to Nazi Germany. If the UN won't do their job, someone has to.

Of course, your average American liberal hates America and almost everything it stands for, so it's no wonder they're opposed to the war. A recent liberal anti-war demonstration featured a mosque leader chanting the Islamic Murder slogan Allahu Akbar, and called America the root of all evil and the real terrorists of the world, while a group of brain-dead liberals cheered emphatically. That should make any sane person disgusted, but liberals are incapable of shame.

As for abortion, that is a VERY important right that I (and any self-respecting sane liberal) should be very scared about being destroyed by this administration... but this argument, as I've seen in political arguments in the recent past around here, devolve real fast into two shouting camps... and all of you (three, at least) are on the one which I can't possibly disagree with more. I think that trying to restrict abortion is really a truly awful position and that stupid stuff about unborn fetuses being the same as living humans is just dumb.

Meaning that you support people being able to make bad decisions and erase the consequences. Did you know that abortion rates are decreasing every year? Now that 3D ultrasounds are possible, mothers-to-be see not a clump of lifeless cells but a forming human being in their womb... and more and more they're deciding not to abort children. That makes me very happy, especially since it required no law or statute.

Let me ask you this: What is your position on partial-birth abortions? Is it okay to kill a child that is aware and very capable of feeling pain?