Gloom and doom

[cidbahamut]

Re: Gloom and doom

I started rereading 1984 today and one of the party slogans reminded me of someone, so I made this. Thought you guys might like it.

I am stealing this because it is too awesome not to share.

[Feba]

Re: Gloom and doom

Considering they really want to merge the currencies of Canada, US and Mexico you'll probably be looking at an Amero kinda thing.

No, because this idea makes no goddamn sense. The Canadians and Americans both see their southern neighbor as fucking insane and pretty unstable, Americans see Canadians as a bunch of pinkos who are going to spend themselves into the ground; the Euroskeptics would come over and say "Look at what happened to the Eurozone; they had to spend billions of dollars saving the asses of the less responsible states, in order to keep their own currency from falling". The US government is heavily reliant on its ability to set its own financial policy; not to mention how much we enjoy having control of the world's reserve currency, something which would be at risk were we to enter into a strange new Amero world. America, both in her citizenry and her politicians, has a very strong aversion to even minor threats to her sovereignty; this is why so many countries have treaties for seemingly basic things, which she refuses to sign.

Frankly, I see it being far more likely (not to mention beneficial to all parties) for the Canadian and Mexican federal governments to disband, and leave Canadian/Mexican states with the option of being sovereign states, forming new republics, or joining the US; and I don't think that's at all likely, or necessarily beneficial. I also think it's more likely that we would see the dollar merged with the Yen than with the Peso.

It would be far easier, and probably the only thing anyone would get close to agreeing to, to peg the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso to the US Dollar, than to try to agree to a single currency. Hell, it would probably be easier to get a Schengen Area type travel/live/work visa arrangemet going on between the three countries than to link them to a single currency.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Gloom and doom

I am stealing this because it is too awesome not to share.

Stolen and posted to Twittaru.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Gloom and doom

the Homosexual Agendaâ„¢

I always wonder who exactly concocts terms like that.

Because its not just the Homosexual Agenda, there's also the Transgender Agenda, too. Apparently wanting to be treated with respect and equality is an agenda now. We're all told as children that its important to "be yourself" all the way through college and then you enter the working world and society wants to just conform and be a Stepford family. If you're a single man, you're seen as unreliable until you're married. If you're a woman, don't dare have an opinion or go against the male ideal set out for you. If you have a sexual preference or a religion, please don't speak of it ever. And you can be of a different race, just don't expect for us to sit with you at lunch or invite you out for a drink after work.

And people fucking wonder why I'm asocial. Being yourself has been outlawed in our culture. And even though we pat ourselves on the back an thing we're tolerant about race and sexuality, we're still have our limits.

It was interesting to me to see people patting themselves on the back about their racial tolerance over the whole Treyvon shooting thing, then call Jenna Talackova an abomination in the same week. It tends to show how far we've not come. Its only acceptable to be yourself within limits determined by other people and their arbitrary bullshit rules. We can't even properly discuss politics unless we see the apparent negatives in both sides. If others can't see your positives as positives, they are somehow instantly idiots even if they were pals just a moment ago.

In some religions its believed in the afterlife you became a god yourself and you create your own little world and universe. Its not the most popular concept, but its one people most commonly try to adapt to the world they live in. I can't help but find the concept just a little depressing.

[Taskmage]

Re: Gloom and doom

Here's how I think it works. People with alternate lifestyles want to be treated with respect and equality. "Good, right-thinking people" take it as axiomatic that these other people are morally wrong. So by asking for respect and equality, LGBT people are asking (I wanted to avoid this label, but let's be honest) right-wing Christians to believe that it's equally valid to be a bad person as a good person, and that the the moral system based on the authority of scripture and the clergy might be wrong. For someone deeply invested in that belief structure, you might as well say up is down and black is white. Ergo, LGBT people have an Agenda to subvert their entire belief structure and destroy everything they think is good about the world. Which, if you think about it from their perspective, is really almost true, even if no gay or transgender person ever specifically intended it. The bottom line is we want them to use a moral system based on compassion, temperance, and a reasoned examination of the facts, rather than stuffy dictums from a 2000 year old book, reinterpreted at will through the lens of whatever prejudice the reader carries. That's scary stuff.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Gloom and doom

I always wonder who exactly concocts terms like that.

Because its not just the Homosexual Agenda, there's also the Transgender Agenda, too. Apparently wanting to be treated with respect and equality is an agenda now. We're all told as children that its important to "be yourself" all the way through college and then you enter the working world and society wants to just conform and be a Stepford family. If you're a single man, you're seen as unreliable until you're married. If you're a woman, don't dare have an opinion or go against the male ideal set out for you. If you have a sexual preference or a religion, please don't speak of it ever.

I'm gonna interject here and say that this isn't exactly a terrible thing. Politics, religion, sexual preference, gender, race, none of these things should mean anything at all in the work place. I work in an office that is full of people who lean conservative, whereas I tend to lean more liberal hippy, so you can bet your ass I check my politics at the door, but so should everyone regardless of which side of the fence they're on. It should be the same deal with everything else you just listed, ideally anyway but we all know how ideals play out.

---------- Post added at 09:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:03 AM ----------

Here's how I think it works. People with alternate lifestyles want to be treated with respect and equality. "Good, right-thinking people" take it as axiomatic that these other people are morally wrong. So by asking for respect and equality, LGBT people are asking (I wanted to avoid this label, but let's be honest) right-wing Christians to believe that it's equally valid to be a bad person as a good person, and that the the moral system based on the authority of scripture and the clergy might be wrong. For someone deeply invested in that belief structure, you might as well say up is down and black is white. Ergo, LGBT people have an Agenda to subvert their entire belief structure and destroy everything they think is good about the world. Which, if you think about it from their perspective, is really almost true, even if no gay or transgender person ever specifically intended it. The bottom line is we want them to use a moral system based on compassion, temperance, and a reasoned examination of the facts, rather than stuffy dictums from a 2000 year old book, reinterpreted at will through the lens of whatever prejudice the reader carries. That's scary stuff.

The christian morality police don't make sense to me though. I was raised as a Christian, got dragged to church every Sunday and had a sort of Sunday school thing too. What I ultimately got out of it was that Jesus' message was pretty clearly one of love, forgiveness and acceptance. Pretty much the complete opposite of what I see the christian morality police doing.

Everything I learned about Christianity indicated that its core principle was compassion.

[Raydeus]

Re: Gloom and doom

No, because this idea makes no goddamn sense. The Canadians and Americans both see their southern neighbor as fucking insane and pretty unstable, Americans see Canadians as a bunch of pinkos who are going to spend themselves into the ground; the Euroskeptics would come over and say "Look at what happened to the Eurozone; they had to spend billions of dollars saving the asses of the less responsible states, in order to keep their own currency from falling". The US government is heavily reliant on its ability to set its own financial policy; not to mention how much we enjoy having control of the world's reserve currency, something which would be at risk were we to enter into a strange new Amero world. America, both in her citizenry and her politicians, has a very strong aversion to even minor threats to her sovereignty; this is why so many countries have treaties for seemingly basic things, which she refuses to sign.

Frankly, I see it being far more likely (not to mention beneficial to all parties) for the Canadian and Mexican federal governments to disband, and leave Canadian/Mexican states with the option of being sovereign states, forming new republics, or joining the US; and I don't think that's at all likely, or necessarily beneficial. I also think it's more likely that we would see the dollar merged with the Yen than with the Peso.

It would be far easier, and probably the only thing anyone would get close to agreeing to, to peg the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso to the US Dollar, than to try to agree to a single currency. Hell, it would probably be easier to get a Schengen Area type travel/live/work visa arrangemet going on between the three countries than to link them to a single currency.

To clarify I'm not saying the Amero scenario is a desirable outcome but the complete opposite.

Joining the US would be the worst possible thing that could happen to Canada or Mexico. Most economies are already moving away from the dollar as a reserve and trading currency, and once the OPEC starts accepting other currencies for oil trade it will be over for the Petrodollar scam. So the Amero becomes viable for the banksters once the US dollar falls under the pressure of it's massive debt and the Petrodollar loses it's monopoly over oil trade, which is what gives it a big portion of it's current value.

This is why I'm saying I hope the USD falls hard enough so the US can't afford to send the military here to force the spread freedom and democracyâ„¢. But I doubt it would go that well unless there's hyperinflation going in the US once SHTF.

[Taskmage]

Re: Gloom and doom

The christian morality police don't make sense to me though. I was raised as a Christian, got dragged to church every Sunday and had a sort of Sunday school thing too. What I ultimately got out of it was that Jesus' message was pretty clearly one of love, forgiveness and acceptance. Pretty much the complete opposite of what I see the christian morality police doing.

Everything I learned about Christianity indicated that its core principle was compassion.

Same here, but clearly there were other people who were taught some very different things. All Christians are not gay-bashers, let's get that out of the way first. All gay-bashers are not Christians, either, but the most vocal and visible segment of them are, and the specific group that coined the term under discussion definitely is.

Homosexual agenda - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the US, the term "the gay agenda" was first used in public discourse in 1992 when the Family Research Council, an American conservative Christian group,[4] released a video series called The Gay Agenda as part of a pack of materials campaigning on homosexual issues and the "hidden gay agenda".[5]

[Armando]

Re: Gloom and doom

Everything I learned about Christianity indicated that its core principle was compassion.

I just use the term "Christian" (as opposed to just Christian) for these people. Sadly, these people make it hard to take any kind of Christian seriously because you don't know which of the two you're getting when someone puts a Jesus Fish on his car or whatnot. I'm naturally wary of anyone who does shit like that though, because if you gotta tell the whole world you're a Christian you're probably a little bit too much into your religion.

EDIT: I think another part of the problem is that anyone and their mother can call themselves Christian if they claim to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. They can tack on whatever crazy ideals they want to enforce to the name Jesus and they're still Christian. It's essentially become a label you can apply to a fake religion to validate it as real.

[Taskmage]

Re: Gloom and doom

7 Rules for Recording Police - Reason Magazine

Tangential to the topic but probably relevant to the people reading it.

---------- Post added at 05:17 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:21 PM ----------

I'm not sure I believe a whit of what this guy is saying, but in the interest of fairness and moderation, here it is.

Jack Goldsmith - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 04/04/12 - Video Clip | Comedy Central

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Gloom and doom

I think another part of the problem is that anyone and their mother can call themselves Christian if they claim to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. They can tack on whatever crazy ideals they want to enforce to the name Jesus and they're still Christian. It's essentially become a label you can apply to a fake religion to validate it as real.

That's just religion , though. To me, there's faith and then there's religion. Faith is a belief, but religion is just politics. King James did a nice edit of the Bible, telling William Shakespeare to omit books of the Old Testament he didn't like but left all of the New Testament intact. Maybe because the book of Revelations had a warning about that sort of editing and James just figured to be safe they wouldn't touch any of it. But how much got taken out? What got lost in translation?

Just as an example there's a verse in the Old Testament about "Wives submit to your husbands" but funny how the other half of that verse always goes mission which is the inverse, "husbands submit to your wives." its about equality in marriage but male dominated churchs always pushed that first part. Its a political agenda, its social engineering. Its not really about what God wants, but for some people its about using God to get people to act how they'd like them too.

People use science the same fucking way. There are plenty of scientists willing to fudge the numbers or delete some findings if it gets them more funding and some bullshit for a politician to throw around. Climate change scientists have been caught doing it. And OMG Godwin's Law, Hitler twisted the works of Darwin and genetics to push his agendas long before he used the church to fall in line on the holocaust.

The thing about stuff like religion and science is that they used to be things people used to be allowed to have questions about. Questions about their existence, questions about how the world works. Sectors of these institutions don't allow for that anymore. I tend to feel sorry for the people that won't question science because its science, its the same as never questioning a preacher because he's the preacher. Science is about asking questions, a preacher is supposed to be a person I can go to with questions and not feel strange about asking them.

[Raydeus]

Re: Gloom and doom

This could be very interesting.

I just hope he doesn't get killed and that the US doesn't block it somehow. <_<;

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Gloom and doom

First Bill O'Reilly defends Ellen Degeneres this, now this.

Jenna Talackova, Transgender Miss Universe Canada Finalist, Defended By Bill O'Reilly (VIDEO)

I still don't agree with him much, but it is nice to know he has a heart.

Well, sometimes.

Bill O'Reilly attacks video games -Destructoid

[Ketaru]

Re: Gloom and doom

the Homosexual Agendaâ„¢
...
I always wonder who exactly concocts terms like that.
...
Its only acceptable to be yourself within limits determined by other people and their arbitrary bullshit rules. We can't even properly discuss politics unless we see the apparent negatives in both sides. If others can't see your positives as positives, they are somehow instantly idiots even if they were pals just a moment ago.

You're right that, for the most part, we can't talk about politics without discussing the other side of the spectrum in the worst terms. If a Republican speaks up against abortion, they are immediately labeled an enemy of women. It's all rhetoric to rile up the party. And to me, that is probably the worst thing about politics right now (or perhaps it has always been). To somebody looking in, it all appears to be nothing more than a war of words. Are you in favor of the right of an unborn child to live? Or are you in favor of women having the right to choose what to do with their bodies? Are those immigrants illegal? Or are they undocumented? Obama Care or Affordable Care?

It all gets tiresome very quickly when you realize that a person's particular choice of wording is all part of the propaganda. In the end, both sides are actually saying the same thing. Just saying it differently. It all depends which buzz words hit home harder.

When it comes to the so-called "Homosexual Agenda", that is just to put a negative spin on the desire for LGB people to be treated with respect and dignity. By calling it an agenda, conservatives can paint a picture of activists infiltrating schools and sneaking pro-gay material into the media. Think of some video games that have recently begun acknowledging that gay people play video games too and should be given equivalent options like the opportunity to pick a same sex spouse in games like Fable, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, or Star Wars: The Old Republic. That's all the "homosexual agenda". Most rational people will see it for what it is. Simply another option. But someone who is anti-gay will see even the option of it as forcing a political view onto them.

Never mind that such companies probably don't care much for politics as much as they do profit. And, if recent trends are any indicator, being in favor of gay equality is way more profitable than being anti-gay.

More strategic use of words, by the way, when it comes to that particular social issue. Pro-Family or Marriage Equality? I mean, trying to put the opposite spin on it doesn't sound nearly as good. Are you for Marriage Inequality or are you Anti-Family?

It was interesting to me to see people patting themselves on the back about their racial tolerance over the whole Treyvon shooting thing, then call Jenna Talackova an abomination in the same week. It tends to show how far we've not come.

Part of that is that transgender issues are never discussed in any significant way and is something that people don't even bother trying to wrap their heads around. Race is frequently discussed and we've had a lot of time to examine it. When it comes to the gay population, people are coming around to realize that they have gay people among their families, friends, neighbors, peers, and coworkers as more are willing to disclose their sexuality. But transgenderism? How many people have ever wrapped their heads around that one? To most of us, the idea that we can feel a disconnect between our mind and our actual bodies is alien. Surely, somebody who would want to take something they were born with and deform it is crazy.

The state appointed guardian of the consumers of our group home is transgender. I step back and, yes, it is a rather unusual. And yeah, she will never pass for a biological woman. And yeah, it is a mindset that I will never understand. But then, maybe it's not my place to try and understand it. She's trying to do something good for society and the fact that she's a Male-to-female transsexual isn't hurting anyone. Certainly not hurting me. I don't see why I ought to judge her.

[Raydeus]

Re: Gloom and doom

For the lulz, and also because... really? Embedded videos now?