So you disagree that young female millies are "activist and feminist in greater numbers than ever before"?Originally Posted by XYMOX_4AD_84
Besides. it happened on the Bill Maher show for Christ's sakeYou're supposed to say outrageous, politically incorrect things there. It's part of the program!
Last edited by Eric the Green; 02-09-2016 at 05:05 PM.
The Influence of Christianity is declining. So, there is no possibility of imposing 'Christian Values'.
Just have to decide to have patience . The Secular side is already winning.
Very sad that we must deal with this as a form of 'war, with conclusion that one side wins or we break apart.
The WaPo has a page with real time updates. There are now more returns than Dixville. There are ~6% of the two counties that encompass The Whites. Granted those are low population counties.
I don't see any such page.
We do have an evolution of Letters of Marque in the contracts signed with companies such as Xe! (formerly Blackwater) and others to engage in private military operations on US govt. behalf.
A lot of it may be a matter of sheer income. NYT published an analysis of the Iowa Caucus results and the key determinant of Sander's support appears to be lower income. And while the NYT dosen't mention this, crossovers from poorer people from supporting Trump to supporting Sanders might well be part of Sander's poorer than expected performance. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/up...vide.html?_r=0 . And income divides very clearly by age with Silents and Boomers in a lot better financial shape than Xers and Millies. So maybe (shock! horror!) it's as simple as Millie women having less money and expecting to have a lot less money unless things change dramatically.So you disagree that young female millies are "activist and feminist in greater numbers than ever before"?
Besides. it happened on the Bill Maher show for Christ's sake
Yes. The devil in a divorce is always in the settlement. Just ask the Ukrainians and the Serbs and Croats and Slovenes. I would suspect that debts would be apportioned on a per capita basis.
The French manage to pay for everything for every French citizen in Medical care. And at half the cost of US care. We'll be able to do this unless "right to die" becomes accepted as a copout not to.
I guess how secular this country becomes will depend on a) how the US fares in the Crisis b) how soon we get our next Awakening and c) what religious groups can get the kind of patronage from business interests in the next 1T to position themselves for the next 2T Awakening. Which is how and why the Christian Right was able to win the last Awakening. Read http://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Und.../dp/1501238205
You mean than Trump's poorer than expected performance. Yes, all that's true.
The secular side winning may have to be accepted, but may also not be accepted by the red-state side. It's still a major motivator of the divide. It may be sad, but I think it's good that the choice is being put to us in this 4T. 4Ts are times for such choices. We can't continue as we are; that's a gradual decline. We have to choose between resuming progress or accelerating the decline.
The blocks put up by the Republicans are just not acceptable to the other side. Climate change is a must-win issue. Prices are rising and wages are falling, making it harder to make ends meet as the 1% accumulate ever-greater wealth and power. Gun violence is becoming intolerable.
On the Republican side, gun control is increasingly anathema, and the fear-based drive for "self-protection" is epidemic. The slogans and memes that say big "intrusive" government is taking tax money from those who earn it to give to freeloaders seems fixed in their minds, especially among business people pressured by economic forces they don't understand. The fear of becoming a different country than the white, Christian and middle class country which dominated the world that they knew in earlier times, upsets them.
Last edited by Eric the Green; 02-09-2016 at 06:35 PM.
Even if one thinks that the US was once a Christian nation, it is clear, at least to me, that this is long past. We are in a different era without some being aware of the current environment.
People, including me ,can and will be upset. However, that does not change the continuing shift toward a secular nation. I still do not see armed rebellion as the outcome.
Does the record tell/show us why?
Well, clearly it's because blacks, Latinos, Asians and Natives are lazy, tend to lean toward crime as a way to make a living, and are - overall - just more thuggish, and basically inferior to "whites." This is tightly reasoned and extensively documented in The Bell Curve by Taylor. >;^)
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."
We went into Iraq thinking Iraq had moved beyond fundamentalist Islam. The US may not be as post-Christian as we might want to think. Civics and Adaptives may have a secular orientation (especially in the latter stages of an unravelling and a Crisis) but there always seems to be another Awakening in the next cycle. Republicans like Thomas Jefferson were quite sure that the US had moved beyond the superstitions of Christianity--and lived to be proven wrong in the Second Great Awakening. As Gilded did the Missionary Awakening and GIs, the Boomer Awakening.
Europe's putative secularism may simply be a result of 30 years of war and Crisis--more a failure of nerve than evolution away from religion. The US will evolve away from Christianity if the next Awakening leaves it predominantly Buddhist.
Rights and Duties
You missed the point entirely. Ain't going to happen. Totally irrelevant. Emotional smoke to no purpose.
Agreed. The bare skeletons of the old militia laws are still there in some states, but fleshing them out to anything useful is very unlikely. I had some thoughts that it could conceivably happen in the days after the September 11th attack. Bin Ladin attacked office space. Highly symbolic office space, but office space none the less. He wasn't going to destroy our ability to fight by depriving us of office space. All he did was tick us off and give political clearance for Bush 43 and the neocons to go nuts.
A more serious and damaging attack might focus on dispersed infrastructure... bridges, power lines, aqueducts, etc... No way do we have enough regular forces to defend all that. We'd need a ton of manpower. A solid ISIS campaign against domestic US infrastructure might conceivably bring back the militia. Not much else is likely to. I don't anticipate such a campaign or a new militia as a response. Still, some folk around these forums talk as if a civil war or insurrection might be due this 4T. If domestic conflict gets serious, if communities start coming under threat, the militia as a dispersed trip wire to alert better trained police or military forces is still plausible. I don't see it as anything near likely, but plausible.
I see the rural and NRA types as likely to step up to the plate and help as they can. I see the urban ammophobics cowering in the ruins and repeating a mantra that defense of the community isn't their job.
The original intent was an armed trained populace and a duty to defend the community. Cornell was spot on in reminding people that there used to be a strenuous serious duty to protect the community. That duty has faded from memory and culture, especially in urban areas, but the rights have not faded, especially in rural areas. The rights of the individual do not go away because the government decides not to exercise some of its powers. Any argument to the contrary is really really silly.
Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon
Look at the record. White defendants get the benefit of the doubt, and greater leniency if actually convicted, than blacks, Latinos or Asians. American Indians probably do even worse than blacks, if that's a comfort to you.
Does the record tell/show us why?
We need to look at the record of who goes to trial and who has to plead guilty to a lesser offence because he or she cannot afford $500 bail. See
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/ma...bail-trap.html . In a city like NYC, things compound. African-American and Latino people are targeted to meet police officers quotas for misdemeanor arrests. Even for something like blocking the sidewalk by standing outside their apartment smoking a cigarette--when there is no foot traffic. Which does not happen with whites, especially whites with money. They are overcharged by prosecutors. They cannot afford bail and plead guilty to a lesser charge to avoid jail time and loss of job. Lather, rinse, repeat. A criminal record is established and is a gift that keeps on giving. It has gotten so bad that African Americans have been looking to move out of NYC to avoid legal trouble. Which helps NYC gentrify poor neighbourhood after poor neighbourhood.
Look at the record. White defendants get the benefit of the doubt, and greater leniency if actually convicted, than blacks, Latinos or Asians. American Indians probably do even worse than blacks, if that's a comfort to you.
Does the record tell/show us why?
It isn't only African Americans at this point. Poorer whites are starting to experience the same kind of legal harassment as African-Americans, particularly in poorer rural areas without racial minorities.
The survival of the state militias is the National Guard. And after the Iraq War, when ALL National Guardspeople got federalised and rotated on at least one job disrupting tour of duty (unless found medically unfit for duty, which many Guardspeople were) poorer white Americans may be leery of joining the National Guard despite the benefits (which do not include access to free medical care).
What we have is millions of Americans clinging to weapons as a security blanket when they do not maintain the training for readiness to really respond appropriately in an emergency. Based on the record of things like home invasions in other countries, this may deter some crime (which is less and less). But at a cost of providing the means to suicide on a whim for millions of Americans with the inclination to do so.
The Israeli experience is the exact opposite. Fewer guns issued to civilians (yes, those guns remain government property) but guns IN civilian hands. And most importantly, those Israelis having those guns getting yearly refresher courses during their month of Army Duty. And THAT kind of "duty to bear arms" has saved a lot of Israeli civilian lives.
I don't see armed rebellion as an outcome, at least initially, either. People have weapons but are not trained to military order as they were during the 1850s. On the other hand, America's armed forces are quite small if it ever comes to widespread armed rebellion. A 1-300 ratio of service personnel to civilians is not enough to put down a widespread revolt in a country the size of the US. It would be a very messy rebellion, though, since civilians would have to "train up" to military order and probably be marked by mutiny and defection within the armed services. And it would not happen unless the System became truly repressive and unyielding. Have a good look at Syria to see what armed rebellion really looks like.
America has always been a secular nation with a diverse population of religious minded people. The secular side hasn't done anything big or bad enough to be severely challenged yet.
Well that may just depend on what kind of inroads Sanders can make with poor whites in "Red States". Unlike Hillary, Sanders does not write off poor whites (ironic, since it was poor whites who gave Bill Clinton his margin of victory in 1992).
This time around, as we are seeing with Trump's appeal in the South, Southern poor whites are not voting their faith in such large numbers (no, they haven't voted yet!) They are more in play than they have been since 1992. And they are not buying the Republican conservative line the way they used to. If they did, Ted Cruz would have the South locked up.
There is a division within Protestant Christianity that may be playing out here. Conservative Christians in the US divide between post-millenialism, which sees the Second Coming happening after the world has been made Christian and God's Kingdom established (Dominionism, Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology) and pre-millenialism, which expects the Tribulation to purify a wicked world (with the hope that Christians will be "raptured" into Heaven to miss the Great Tribulation.
Aligned with this division is the division between Arminianism, the idea that anyone can be Saved by being "born again" and Calvinist Predestinarianism, the idea that some people are predestined for Salvation and some for Damnation with one's status on Earth as a good indicator of who is who.
Needless to say, as Conservative Christianity has moved into greater support for Neo-liberalism, Calvinism and Dominionism have moved into the vanguard, at least amongst more affluent Christians. (Which was also the case during the Gilded Age). What we may be seeing the signs of is that this shift in Christianity toward a more predestinarian orientation, more congruent with Republican Neo-Liberalism (Huckabee, Michelle Bachman, and Perry are Dominionists and Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are conservative Catholics) may have alienated a lot of poorer white Christians. Which may help explain why so many of them are turning to Trump, who while non-religious, speaks to their needs. And why some of them may even be interested in Sanders, though they find Hillary anathema.
Does this mean that they are losing their religion? Or that the predominant religion has lost and written off them? Being considered damned and Hellbound because one is poor is a tough thing to accept, particularly when that poverty is easily seen as the result of decisions by bosses and elites. They have been claiming that car in the name of Jesus for the last 20 years--and neither they nor Jesus can make the payments.
Last general election polling map for Bernie Sanders before the New Hampshire primaries. I'm not showing Bush, Carson, or Fiorina this time. I may have to add Kasich on the next set of maps.
Bernie Sanders(D) vs. Ted Cruz (R)
Bernie Sanders vs. Marco Rubio
Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump
30% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 3% or less
40% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 4% or more
60% -- lead with 50-54%
70% -- lead with 55-59%
90% -- lead with 60% or more
White -- tie or someone leading with less than 40%.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Apparently many Hillary supporters think Millennials are still children who have their parents pay their bills.
They shit on us and then wonder why we hate them.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Now involving Hillary Clinton:
Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush
Hillary Clinton(D) vs. Ted Cruz (R)
Hillary Clinton vs. Marco Rubio
Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump
30% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 3% or less
40% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 4% or more
60% -- lead with 50-54%
70% -- lead with 55-59%
90% -- lead with 60% or more
White -- tie or someone leading with less than 40%.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
