babble Hall of Fame: version X.2.1

You want gun control?  Start a website devoted to arming the left.  Education on weapons, how to purchase, how to navigate the regulations, etc.

You'd have gun control faster than Flaherty at a blind man kicking contest.

Harper is just a shoulder parrot for Uncle Peg-leg next door. Harper and his reformaTories are full of baloney on their best of days. If we can't take him seriously, how can leaders of real countries treat him like a real leader? Harper is a stooge.

Hey, this is a thread about personal attacks, not techo-babble. Either launch a personal attack or go elsewhere.

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Bagkitty shadow moderating the personal attack thread...

 

Tommy Paine on gun control:

 

Sven,

I think the individualism you promote would have been very sensible in the 18th century, when the state of philosophical knowledge was as it was. The simple fact is that a lot of these individualist theories have been comprehensively discredited by reasoned arguments and detailed research. They simply don't hold. I don't buy into the environmental determinism of a few on this thread but they very much have a point and they're closer to reality than you are. I'll address some of your points.

 

This for example is a completely false dichotomy. The example that immediately comes to mind is the 1960s USian civil rights act, which a lot of charlatan libertarians like to argue forced a behavioral system on innocent business owners by government fiat. It was nothing like that... it was the business owners forcing their backwards way of mind onto African Americans for hundreds of years. The nominal change that there was was not brought in "by government", but actually by the collective individual actions of millions of people who were actively fighting the system and bringing tremendous pressure on the Johnson administration.

 

Blaming video games is a nice populist theory but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There simply are better schools, better learning environments and better teachers and these make a tremendous difference. There's an excellent article in this month's The Atlantic which investigates 20 years of data that Teach for America has collected on the rrecent graduates it sends to inner city schools. They try and select for better teachers, and now they find that 44% of their teachers succeed in raising their students test scores by over 1.5 grade levels. If teachers didn't matter as you imply then that wouldn't be the case.

In all schools, there's a distribution of the amount of time kids spend on video games, as there is between schools as well. It's not the games. It's everything. Teachers, schools, home environment, etc.

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If anything, going after simple explanations like "video games" is not jut false, it's lazy. You're being frightened away from the underlying complexity of reality, because you don't want to think that hard and you might not like the answers.

Tommy Paine on gun control:

Well, there is the thousand David Frum rule, I'll give you that.   

 

But without mummy, and unless marrying astutely is a journalistic skill, there's not much between him and "would you like fries with that?"

 

Don't worry, I changed my mind on that when I realized I was going to have to spend eternity with Ezra Levant!

In fact, a true conservative would look at the huge amounts put away by Norway over a relatively short period of time and recognize Alberta as financially imprudent, at best, and probably stupefied by an idiotic ideology that argues you put yourself first by screwing thyself and beggaring thy neighbour while handing all thine wealth to huge corporations that will leave your home a smoldering ruin when they're done. What a bunch of fucking idiots.

Open apologists of the former South African apartheid system, defenders of everyday systemic forms of oppression in this country, and those who excuse and support violent colonialism in other places traditionally have been ushered to the exits here. Can anyone explain the lenient standard applied in terms of the level of tolerance for hate against Palestinians and support for tyranny against them in threads of this nature? What any sensible person can clearly define as brutal oppression apparently is a matter of debate and merely comes down to ones point of view.

Instead of isolating them from meaningful dialogue as the pariahs they are, spitting distain without regret through the act of expelling their reprehensible excuses and ideology from a community which speaks of valuing human decency over the monstrosity that these interlopers pathetically represent, they are continuously permitted to assault reason, honesty, justice, and dignity with every fetid post that documents not only their shame, but our own in not calling for their immediate removal whenever they rear their ugly heads on this board.

Come on; who else defends ethnic cleansing, theft and murder because God is their realtor?

I don't understand these kinds of comments.  They're portraying the people who are crticial of DiNovo with all these stereotypes of people on the left.  That we're purists who denounce anyone who strays from the party line, that we're doctrinaire, wtc.

We need to remember, that it was DiNovo who denounced us and called people nasty things on facebook and whatnot.  Why aren't people saying "Okay, so the IAW folks aren't perfect.  Who is?  But so, not every one of their views aligns perfectly with the self-anointed adjudicator of what is acceptable on the left, Cheri DiNovo"

I mean, this is really showing some messed up and unbalanced power relations between activists and politicians on the left.  It's almost saying that we need to quickly forgive them for their transgressions, while they are free to constantly denounce us for our principles.

I don't see a need for NATO in Europe. NATO should have gone the way of the Berlin Wall, East Germany, communism in Europe, the U.S.S.R. and the Cold War.

You can accomplish far greater things through trust, dialogue and cooperation than by fear, mistrust and antagonism.

Well the problem with a monument to the victims of capitalism is that you need to put an electronic ticker on it to keep tallying up the victims...

What a moron.

I think there are US style Trotskyists who feel that socialism can't possibly survive without first condemning the Soviets, Koreans and Cubans as having been the evil empire. They feel obligated to legitimize themselves in the presence of liberals and conservatives. And I find they tend to sound a lot like American and Canadian conservatives at times when regurgitating the rabid anti-communist cold war era rhetoric.

Apparently there's such a clamour out there for making parliament work with the harpocrites, that it compels opposition parties through the sheer weight of public opinion to bend their entire ideology to the task.

You suggest you have the key to the solution. Please stop being so coy. Can you add any substance to these hints, or is yapping all you'll contribute?

Take your time responding, though; I have to take my zoot suit to the cleaners now and won't be back for a while.

Those who preach cynicism about social change are worse enemies than the "real" enemies. Their efforts demoralize others and poison them with the same virus that they are infected with.

Relax trippie this is a party of one.

Btw, just because you put the word "radical" in front of something, doesn't actually make it radical.

Ergo:

"The magical, chocolate-dipped, groovy, most excellent, fabulous, innovative centre."

See? And I got nauseous while typing that.

P.S. I think I said what Slumberjack just said. Only wittier.

The Hens were fed up. Fox lay in the corner of the henhouse, and grinned through bloody teeth. "We must rise up and defeat Fox", said Hen, "for we shall never be free while he's in here, and our chicks will never be safe!"

Fox grinned through bloody teeth. "Sister Hen" he said, "Don't concern yourself with such matters. Lay eggs, see that I am fed, and I will protect you from harm"

Hen had had enough. One morning, while Fox slept, the hens attacked. But what could they do, with stunted beak and wing, to defeat Fox, whose teeth gnashed and spit blood and feathers?

"We must have help", said Hen.

"Someone help Sister Hen!" cried Rat, looking through the boards at the fight inside. "Fox will kill them all!" Rat gnashed his teeth with worry, but his beady eyes beheld the eggs.

"We must help Sister Hen!" cried Badger. "There is much we can do to stop Fox". She shed tears and gnashed her teeth, and her black eyes beheld the chicks.

"We will help Sister Hen" cried Wolf. "My pack and I have the tools to stop it. We shall ask our Sister Bobcat, and our Brother Eagle to help us save the coop! For Hen shall live in freedom, and never more fear Fox's gnashing teeth." And their cold, white eyes beheld the warm nests within.

So Fox was vanquished. And Wolf, and Bobcat, and Eagle, and Badger, and Rat, rested contentedly and righteously, their teeth red with blood, and their beds soft with feather.

I'm not sure if you realize the irony of your post.

Alan -- I agree.

The media, owned by big business love him, and enough voters either want a tax cut because they are doing well; hope to do well and use the tax cut later; or are stupid enough to think that policies designed to help those better off than them are somehow in the end going to help them and the apathetic.

We already have a coalition of sorts: the greedy, the stupid and the apathetic and the currency is propaganda.

If everyone on the left just lit themselves on fire the Cons would buy marshmallows.

This is true. Liberals seem to believe they are "entitled" to the support of NDP voters in close races with the Cons.

In my riding, Etobicoke Centre, the incumbent Liberal lost to the Conservative by 26 votes (there will be a recount). The Liberal blames the NDP, who ran third. In actual fact, the Conservative vote increased by 2,822 and the Liberal vote decreased by 2,902; those Con votes didn't come from the NDP, but from the Liberals.

Personally, I blame the Marxist-Leninists for the Con win. Their 149 votes exceeds the Conservative margin of victory! 

As the saying goes, I'd use The Province for toilet paper, except it's already covered in crap.

it's the "company store" on a national level.

Yes, the big business elite and the oil patch likes having two conservative parties that can alternate in power - the Conservative (conservative) Party and Liberal (conservative) Party.

They don't like the idea that a non-conservative party might ever take power.

I'm not sure why these big "L" Liberals went on anhd on about how we all needed to "stop Harper" - when its clear that they agree with him about 98% of the time. i guess its what's called the narcissism of small difference. I think I saw some election research that showed that the only and only "issue" that unites Liberal supporters is personal dislike of Stephen Harper - but none of them mind his actual policies.

Anyways, rightwing liberals have as much right to exist as anyone - but don't come here trying to pretend to be "progressive" and then approvingly quote a red-baiting editorial from the calgary Herald!

[Generic troll name], you've been warned about displaying contempt for leftist politics through your baiting before. I think you know what's wrong with post 7 and you're smart enough to be more precise in your smearing off the left, this board and it's politics. Be more judicious in the future.

Where did this happen?

"DSK is about as threatening to global imperialism as Tony Blair."

genstrike, throwing the truth around with wild abandon, # 38, here:

 

http://rabble.ca/babble/international-news-and-politics/head-internation...

Sorry Snert but this has nothing much to do with you.  I quoted Catchfire and that was my focus.  I have taken your name out of it so you get that you are not my focus.

Didn't an US Supreme Court justice say he couldn't define pornography but he could recognize it when he saw it? I feel in a similar manner about conspiracy theories. The almost always fly in the face of Occam's Razor.

Bigfoot goes down on the science of it. [...] But religion cowers and claims special protection from such examination, and those who hold those positions get all huffy and feel persecuted when their ideas wither in front of reasoned probing. 

So I'm not so sure it's us being rude, so much as the awakening.

But the commentary on Nycole Turmel is really moronic, because they've settled on this idiotic line that she is a three-month old rookie MP, and thus knows nothing about "politics", whereas every business man who ever walked Bay Street (or prof from Harvard) is assumed to be instantly qualified to be Prime Minister.

I've been following US politics since Eisenhower, and, if you'll exuse my use of the vulgate, it gets more fucking nuts every year.  Exponentially so I might add. Like really it's gone from Dr. Strangelove to a bad Coen brothers movie way past anything The Onion could imagine as satire, right into the realm of methyl alchohol induced nightmares.

They should replace bloody Washington on their money with Edvard Munch's 'the Scream"!

Negative - Does not present himself in a manner consistent with the norms of the dominant culture