Yeah. Until they ate it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL6-oFPeNco

Thank you for your conjecture on how adults conduct themselves and interact, Reindeer. I'm happy to you inform you, however, that adults do not interact like 6 year olds on a playground.

When the government is armed and you're not, you're a subject, not a citizen.

I'm glad you think you can beat up home invaders. I'm sure you're invincible on the internet. But you're not in real life, and neither is anybody else. There are countless tales of the elderly and disabled defending themselves with firearms. Not everyone is an invincible body builder with martial arts training like you. Firearms and a little practice enable them to defend themselves better than your "survival of the fittest" defense strategy. Not everyone thinks you deserve to be victimized when you're old or disabled, as you do.

Firearms don't magically make people think every confrontation should be deadly. As much as I'll be the first to tell you that people are, on average, pretty damn stupid, they're not nearly as dumb as you make them out to be. Your conjecture is purely academic. Americans have been armed regularly for hundreds of years, and the scenarios which obviously terrify you just aren't common. Anyone that dumb deserves to be removed from society permanently.

I love how they're claiming they didn't mean to burn the place down... when we've heard the police radio calls to burn the place down.

The biggest accusation was that he had a role in covering up pedophilia and rape while he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I don't know where you guys get your news.

It is the Roman Catholic Church's position that sex's place is within marriage and open to conception. There are those within the Church that argue that contraception (e.g. condoms--not methods which dispose of fertilized eggs like birth control pills) is acceptable when used for planning purposes within loving marriages which are open to children when they're ready. (e.g. newly married couple with expenses to catch up on and savings to build up before they have a child.) But yes, the Church's official position is still that all birth control is interfering with natural processes of love and creation.

While, were I a Catholic, I'd certainly be in the camp arguing for the acceptance of certain forms of contraception which prevent conception, I'm not sure I agree that the Church's official no-contraception policy is _that_ archaic--not when compared to prevalent values (or lack thereof) in most cultures today. The amount of harm that promiscuous people do is literally incalculable. The effects of single parenthood (most of which is not the result of death or divorce) on poverty and crime rates are massive. The cultural effects of so many children never having witnessed a loving marriage are yet to be seen, but the fact that far less children are growing up witnessing stable relationships does not bode well.

I don't hold the Catholic position, but to vilify it as if it's massively harmful, and current cultural trends aren't far worse, ignores most of what's going on in society for the past few decades, in my opinion.

You_Fool, you said this:

"Anyway the idea that low or zero taxes solves all social woes and that deregulation of everything ensures people are not exploited is a foolish idea, nice but ultimately foolish and hence moronic to hold."

Which is a response to nothing anybody said here.

And when you said:

"Maybe generalising the tea party but, meh, close enough...."

You just called them idiots. You never took issue with a single one of their ideas. Sounds more like trolling than discourse. You've literally said nothing about their ideas but that you think they're idiotic. And that different ideas than they hold are ineffective, in your opinion.

Nowhere have I advocated lawlessness. You're just crying about straw-man arguments I never presented. None of which are relevant to this topic. If you want to present any sort of argument that libertarianism is similar to socialism in practice, feel free to start a topic and present it.

You still haven't explained on what basis you label Tea Party ideology as idiotic.

Yeah it's in his manifesto. The edited/shortened version leaves out all the political stuff. Purely coincidence, I am sure.

I ask you the same question I asked Einstein: What do you propose we do about it?

We antagonized them when we supported their oppressor decades ago. We continue to sanction them and threaten them to this day.

I'm obviously no fan of their regime. It's horrible and oppressive. But what are you proposing that we do? Because sanctions have proven ineffective; they still have trading partners. They still develop nuclear weapons. They still threaten Israel.

All I see is threats and further antagonisation--evidence that Iran is just being used unite people against a foreign enemy in order to distract sheeple from the rights they're losing. I don't see anybody proposing anybody but more of the same.

"Equal" does not mean "identical" or "interchangeable."

We prop up dictators. Why do we act surprised when people overthrow their dictators, whom we supported, and hate us for having oppressed them?

All of the tyrants we support are worse than the British ever were to us. And we fought and killed many of them. Why do we expect others to react more kindly to more brutal oppression?

This is beside the simple point that no, they are not a threat to our national sovereignty or our citizens. These are not the same issues nor arguments:

1) Iran is not a threat to us. Period. Einstein thinks Syria has the Boomerang system for locating shooters; all of his arguments are not only amateurish, misleading, and ignorant, but also riddled with embarrassing lies of expertise. He accepts the fear-mongering of those in power who want him worried about a foreign threat while their rights are steadily taken away at home. It's the same thing Iran's government does to its people.

2) We need to stop pretending our hands are always clean and everyone who hates us is a big bad meanie. Yes, many of them are. But we choose to be there. We choose to give dictators billions; we choose to oppress people. We shouldn't be doing that. We should know better. Our values should be better.

Neither of these points is a go-to or cop-out if the other fails. They're separate points. They both just happen to support the notion that maybe we should reevaluate our Middle-East policy of fear-mongering and oppression (both at home and abroad).

Awwww they're 18th to our first. "by comparison" means relatively speaking. Our GDP is more than 15 times theirs. By comparison, that's dirt poor. By comparison, that doesn't fund a military remotely comparable to ours.

The point is, if they ever became an actual threat to the United States, we would have the capacity to decimate them and they wouldn't have the capacity to stop us. If our leaders weren't corrupt, bloviating bureaucrats with the mentalities of small children, avoidance of this possibility would keep Iran from interfering with our affairs--such as shipping.

OH NO THEY'VE CAPTURED 2 DRONES! THEY'LL BE INVADING NEXT!

What do you think we're accomplishing by giving them a foreign enemy to unite and control their oppressed people? Speaking of using foreign enemies to unite people and distract them from oppression, isn't that what Iran is to you?

They can't even send a missile halfway to us--and, even if they could, they wouldn't be stupid enough to because we have the capacity to literally turn their entire nation into glass. Yet you want to do... what, exactly?