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Belian In honor of my 50lb pup from 42 Since: Jan, 2001
In honor of my 50lb pup
#48251: Jan 26th 2013 at 3:38:07 PM

I want to say that is a Sam And Max refference, but I'm not sure...

Yu hav nat sein bod speeling unntil know. (cacke four undersandig tis)the cake is a lie!
Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#48252: Jan 26th 2013 at 3:51:34 PM

So I just found out that Bill O'Reilly stated Christianity is a philosophy instead of a religion.

...

Can we tax the churches now?

edited 26th Jan '13 3:56:04 PM by Kostya

Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#48253: Jan 26th 2013 at 3:57:11 PM

[up] But Christianity fills all the requirements of being a religion. It is a philosophy, but in addition to being a religion. So is Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Shinto, Buddhism (That I could see the argument being used against), Zoroastrianism and so on.

Essentially, he's saying religions don't exist, but I don't think he's smart enough to realize that.

edited 26th Jan '13 3:57:44 PM by Zendervai

Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#48254: Jan 26th 2013 at 3:59:38 PM

I don't care what it actually is. All I know is that he just justified taxing it. Since religious exemptions cost the government about 71 billion dollars a year this would be a pretty good chunk of change to take in and he couldn't even complain without being a hypocrite.

edited 26th Jan '13 4:00:02 PM by Kostya

OhnoaBear I'm back, baby. from Exiting, pursued by a... Since: Jan, 2011
I'm back, baby.
#48255: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:02:07 PM

O'Reily is a very intelligent, if modestly despicable, man who royally put his foot in his mouth. He's not stupid. He made a pretty serious mistake, though, and left the door open for months of mockery that hasn't really been as prominent as it could.

"The marvel is not that the Bear posts well, but that the Bear posts at all."
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#48256: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:02:30 PM

Yeah, that might cause problems. Sure, there are churches that have money, but there are also a ton of churches that completely depend on the tithe week to week. I think a lot of them count as non-profit organizations as well.

Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#48257: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:04:52 PM

[up][up]I should have heard about that sooner. It surprises me no one seized on that to make a point.

[up]Obviously it would only tax income above a certain amount. Still, I'm sure we could get a decent amount of money from that. Probably even more if we ended exemptions for Temples and Mosques.

edited 26th Jan '13 4:05:11 PM by Kostya

OhnoaBear I'm back, baby. from Exiting, pursued by a... Since: Jan, 2011
SecretLink Since: Jul, 2010
#48259: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:08:01 PM

[up] probably because even most conservatives consider Bill an idiot and hack. it only keeps being funny if someone takes offense to it

edited 26th Jan '13 4:10:20 PM by SecretLink

“ I am not insane… What I am saying is most true and reasonable”
Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#48260: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:37:31 PM

[up]Really? Fox News is losing ground but it's still really popular and I'm fairly certain O'Reilly and his cohorts are a big factor in that.

DeviantBraeburn Wandering Jew from Dysfunctional California Since: Aug, 2012
Wandering Jew
#48261: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:39:26 PM

Bloomberg pledges $350 million to Johns Hopkins University

Nats will name William Howard Taft new racing president

Governor Rick Scott Praised By 'Satanists'

So I just found out that Bill O'Reilly stated Christianity is a philosophy instead of a religion.

O'Reilly backtracked a week later, and stated the Christianity is both a religion and a philosophy.

edited 26th Jan '13 4:49:40 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016
Serocco Serocco from Miami, Florida Since: Mar, 2010 Relationship Status: Faithful to 2D
Serocco
#48262: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:43:34 PM

Appropriate that you mentioned Bloomberg, Braeburn.

I just found out that New York City is banning sodas.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#48263: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:55:00 PM

[up][up]I expected him to do that.

[up]How have you not heard about that yet?

edit: Also they're not banning sodas. It applies to sodas that are too large.

edited 26th Jan '13 4:55:18 PM by Kostya

DeviantBraeburn Wandering Jew from Dysfunctional California Since: Aug, 2012
Wandering Jew
#48264: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:55:38 PM

[up][up]

Speaking of that ban:

NAACP and Hispanic Federation join lawsuit to sink Mayor Bloomberg’s soda restrictions

edited 26th Jan '13 4:58:56 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016
DevilTakeMe Coin Operator from Wild Wasteland Since: Jan, 2010
Coin Operator
#48265: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:57:51 PM

For every big news item, smaller items tend to fall through the cracks. If you didn't hear about it, it wasn't publicized enough to catch your attention. There's always stories like that.

(If you watch the Daily Show, Jon Stewart routinely brings it up when he mentions New York politics)

Glove and Boots is good for Blog!
Serocco Serocco from Miami, Florida Since: Mar, 2010 Relationship Status: Faithful to 2D
Serocco
#48266: Jan 26th 2013 at 4:59:36 PM

Well, I heard of another story that's more recent.

The Sierra Club announced that it is lifting its long-standing institutional prohibition on civil disobedience so that it can protest the development of the tar sands.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
Trivialis Since: Oct, 2011
#48267: Jan 26th 2013 at 5:34:01 PM

@darksidevoid

Independents aren't actually independent, you know. There's only a very small number of people, ten to fifteen percent, who qualify as truly undecided. All the rest lean toward one party or another strongly enough not to switch over. That's an empirically verified fact, accepted by the vast majority of Political Scientists.

We already have mechanisms for the creation of third parties; It's just that the third parties we do have are too niche and lack enough popular support, and the nature of our system favors the consolidation of many competing factions into two parties. As a matter of fact, multi-party, proportional representation systems tend toward empowering radical factions. In contrast, our system favors moderation and gradual reform, as the Framers intended - although the GOP leadership is gumming up the gears by treating it like a Parliamentary system, as I mentioned earlier.

The Democratic Party instituting multiparty reforms - if voters would even be willing to accept that, which I highly doubt - would be the equivalent of slitting its own throat, because the Democratic base has historically been much less united than the Republican base. Hence, with the splintering of the Democrats, the Republicans would have no need to reform themselves after all, because they could still manage to win a plurality of the vote. Oops.

And by the way, party strength is far from superfluous, nor is the only reason for having it to push back against another party. The entire idea of having a party in the first place is to get people elected and thereby attempt to pass laws that favor one's ideological bent. Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties exist solely for the purpose of opposing one another, but rather for the sake of pursuing their favored reforms, reforms which are increasingly at odds.

The plurality wouldn't mean much if the splintered Democrats could manage to hold a coalition. Just because Republicans have the most members doesn't mean it gets what it wants.

I just think that Democrats, by trying to have simplicity and some gain in front of them, are missing out on more long-term benefits. We can see from former single-party states that, the party pushing for democratic reforms gets remembered as the one who served the people's interests. Sometimes the former party in control itself does this, and remained as one of the major parties after that (see Kuomintang in Taiwan). They traded their own party strength for genuine democratic support. Likewise, Democrats could vindicate themselves by accepting that role; if they actively suppress democracy, they're wasting an opportunity to truly stand out as a progressive, populous, democratic party in contrast to the Republicans.

The third parties, like Libertarians and Greens, generally support multiparty systems. Would the Libertarians emphasize this, and then abandon those reforms if they replace the Republicans? That would make them unpopular for being hypocritical.

I support having multiparty reforms for this reason. Instead of struggling to be the lesser of two evils in a flawed system, being the party that tries to fix the system itself would make the Democrats shine as the truly good party. It represents the people better, and it makes the party more popular and respected.

edited 26th Jan '13 5:38:19 PM by Trivialis

Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#48268: Jan 26th 2013 at 5:44:02 PM

This is a real thing? How does anybody take this fucking paper seriously? It depresses me that my dad reads it.

DeviantBraeburn Wandering Jew from Dysfunctional California Since: Aug, 2012
Wandering Jew
#48269: Jan 26th 2013 at 5:47:05 PM

[up][up]

I think that multi-party reforms would be a good thing for this country. But I still can't see Democrats creating them.

edited 26th Jan '13 5:49:55 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016
Trivialis Since: Oct, 2011
#48270: Jan 26th 2013 at 5:51:49 PM

I know currently Democrats are not really considering it. I'm saying that that's not a wise thing to do.

Many people are still iffy in the Democrat-Republican block (if you count people not really voting or participating in politics, they would just shrug it off). They're still divided in issues like having better governmental support vs having more economic freedom. But directly pointing out, say, the unpopularity of the 112th Congress, and promising to change the structural flaws? Promising a better representative democracy is easy for the layperson to understand. Focusing on electoral reform would go hand-in-hand with the grassroots movements that want the government fixed.

darksidevoid Anti-Gnosis Weapon from The Frontiers (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Robosexual
Anti-Gnosis Weapon
#48271: Jan 26th 2013 at 5:59:57 PM

Then how does, Britain for one, have three major parties yet uses FPTP?
Their rules for getting parties on the ballot are considerably less restrictive than our own. Besides, they had only two major parties until the Lib Dems made a surprisingly strong showing in 2010 (and then Clegg immediately decided to play second fiddle to the Conservatives, which basically killed their future chances). At that point before election day in 2010, a large portion of the U.K. voting population was fed up with the existing parties, and hence a third party like the Lib Dems could flourish, if temporarily. The idea isn't that there will never be a third party, but rather that it will just be absorbed shortly thereafter. In the historical scheme of things, there will only be two parties.

GM: AGOG S4 & F/WC RP; Co-GM: TABA, SOTR, UUA RP; Sub-GM: TTS RP. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new Empire.
TheyCallMeTomu Since: Jan, 2001 Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
#48272: Jan 26th 2013 at 7:07:52 PM

I am deeply ashamed that I did not catch the earlier Sam and Max reference.

Ramidel Since: Jan, 2001
#48273: Jan 26th 2013 at 7:30:27 PM

@Tomu: Point conceded. In this case, I think it's roughly comparable to the disconnect between Catholicism and Catholic voters. Nobody pays any attention to the Pope or to the Ayn Rand Institute anymore; the difference being that people have a lot fewer qualms about waving Ayn Rand's name (without Leonard Peikoff's consent) in favor of modern libertarianism than they do about using the Pope to (for example) justify abortion.

darksidevoid Anti-Gnosis Weapon from The Frontiers (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Robosexual
Anti-Gnosis Weapon
#48274: Jan 26th 2013 at 7:33:32 PM

Promising a better representative democracy is easy for the layperson to understand.

The devil's in the details. To address your longer post ([up]x6), however:

The plurality wouldn't mean much if the splintered Democrats could manage to hold a coalition. Just because Republicans have the most members doesn't mean it gets what it wants.

It's probably a bad idea to go too far into the specifics of hypotheticals, and it's really not relevant to the point, but I'll address this first. If the Democrats splintered at all, they obviously wouldn't be able to hold a coalition, because a political party is already the optimal form for a political coalition, and if they had to splinter in the first place then there would surely be enough bad blood among them to prevent them from cooperating. Besides, the plurality matters most on the level of district. We have single-member districts, meaning only one member is elected from any one district, by the plurality of votes. Hence, practically the entire Senate would be made up of Republicans, as would most of the House, and the Presidency would probably be Republican as well, considering the nature of the electoral college.

Likewise, Democrats could vindicate themselves by accepting that role; if they actively suppress democracy, they're wasting an opportunity to truly stand out as a progressive, populous, democratic party in contrast to the Republicans.

Are you calling what we have now an active suppression of democracy? It's not. Having a functional democracy does not inherently require that we have as many parties as possible. The reason we don't have viable third parties is that the existing parties already encompass what the voting public wants to see, and existing third parties don't encompass enough of it. Otherwise, voters would be moving away from the Republicans and Democrats and moving toward the Libertarians and Greens.

Any and all systems are flawed. You will not find a perfect system, nor will you be able to fix a flawed system into a perfect one. It will merely be flawed in a different way, though perhaps marginally less flawed. Electoral reforms sound great on paper, and we could use some, but it's when you get to the specifics that any coalition you may have built will fall apart like a house of cards. I'd like to lower the vote threshold required for third parties to get on the ballot, and I'd like campaign finance reform and to impose term limits on Congress, and that's about it, though the last one would probably require a Constitutional amendment. Then, if We The People really want a third party to win, we'll vote for them and/or start a movement behind them.

In any case, I don't feel like this is such an essential issue that the Democrats ought to abandon the rest of their policy agenda and potentially destroy themselves for the sake of it. And that's exactly what would happen if they tried it, because the amount of political capital required would be astronomical. I might be of a different opinion if wholesale electoral reform had actually been something that the Democrats had campaigned on, because then it would be the will of the people.

edited 26th Jan '13 7:53:09 PM by darksidevoid

GM: AGOG S4 & F/WC RP; Co-GM: TABA, SOTR, UUA RP; Sub-GM: TTS RP. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new Empire.
Pykrete NOT THE BEES from Viridian Forest Since: Sep, 2009
NOT THE BEES
#48275: Jan 26th 2013 at 8:08:20 PM

Are you calling what we have now an active suppression of democracy? It's not.

Well for one, we have plenty of active suppression of democracy. Look at the Voter ID laws, voter intimidation, trying to kick poor people off the voting rolls via "clerical errors", several cases of election fraud.

The reason we don't have viable third parties is that the existing parties already encompass what the voting public wants to see, and existing third parties don't encompass enough of it. Otherwise, voters would be moving away from the Republicans and Democrats and moving toward the Libertarians and Greens.

Not true. The reason we don't have viable third parties is mainly because of polarization. People are less concerned with putting the right person in power, and more concerned with making sure "the bad guy" doesn't win. This results in people getting cowed out of voting for third parties out of fear that the big party closer to them will lose critical votes and let the other big party in. Most of the people I know that voted for a third party this last cycle were people who were nearly as disgusted with Obama's more subtle shenanigans as they were with Romney being a flagrant corporate shill and thought they were both horrible.

In places that have implemented instant-runoff voting, which circumvents that fear, third parties actually win seats rather often.

edited 26th Jan '13 8:12:14 PM by Pykrete


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