I’m not that important.
“The fascists took over in January, 2001.”
That’s somewhat of a remarkable statement, Diogenes. Took over where, what? Are you, perhaps, another whiney anti-Bush Democrat? Just go ahead and vote. It’s your democratic right, right?
Personally, if someone is charged with protecting my ass, I’m delighted if they have at least an SMG.
- PW
What makes the person important is the mouth. The loudest complainers are always the first to go in a facist environment.
No militant fascist bastards anywhere. Maybe France. Sorry.
They were German border guards just doing their jobs. It was one of many border crossings on the way to Vienna. The currency would change every time I took a nap – seriously.
Hot damn… my new sig!
I’m not a Democrat.
But when the band plays “Hail to the Chief,” you know they point the SMG right at you.
What makes them important is if they can influence other people. A loud mouth per se is not a threat unless that mouth can find an audience. This is especially true when you’re talking about a crypto-fascist regime like the Bush administration. They can’t allow themselves to be too obvious. They squelch free speech but they do it more subtle ways, like having the Secret Service march protesters a half mile down the road to “free speech” zones out of eyeshot of Bush and tv cameras…or maybe like blowing your wife’s intelligence cover as retribution for exposing Bush’s lies.
[quote]
crypto-fascist regime That’s a great buzzterm among the loony left conspiracy set. It means nothing, save that the one using it has no real evidence to back up the “fascist” assertion being made. “Crypto” means BS when dealing with public policy.
If the world really were as simple as partisan politics, oh, what a merry Christmas it would be. Moving protesters a short distance away?! Oh, the humanity. What’s next, summary executions?
Dio, we get it. You despise Republicans. Every thread you post to eventually takes a swing at them.Do you hate Lincoln? Would you prefer slavery still be accepted? (Weak, I know, but sometimes a Republican can actually do some good).
Oh, wait, you said you’re not a Democrat. So either you’re a 3rd Party loon, or you just hate America altogether.
Which is it? Please feel free to reply anyway you want, there aren’t any government agencies that will show up at your door tonight. You live in a country so free that you can rant as you see fit, and feel safe after closing out of SDMB. Really sucks living in the U.S., huh?
I fly through Frankfurt every 5 weeks. There are always a few uber-sized guards with sub-machine guns wandering around there. In Dubai you see guards with pistols. In Yemen you see them with pistols and AK’s. The guys with the AK’s scare the crap out of me. Not because I think they’d use them on anyone purposely, but having been in the military myself, I know enough not to use my rifle as prop for leaning on. I keep waiting for the “BANG” that indicates someone just vaporized their noggin. I’ve never seen such a blatant disregard for the basics of weapon safety.
I despise Bush, not republicans. i think if you really look at my posting history you’ll see that I basically just bash Bush and his administration. I don’t bash Republicans or conservatives in general (although I might bash a policy or two).
Lincoln was a liberal, btw. Party ideologies change over the years. Republicans weren’t always on the right.
There are two stupid assumptions in that senrence. One is that all third parties are 'loony," the second is that if someone doesn’t belong to any poltical party they must “hate America.”
I’m a liberal independent. I’ve never belonged to any political party and I’ve never hated America…please, get another strawman. That one’s had the shit kicked out of too many times…
I can rant as long as I don’t do it in earshot of the president. I also better not bust him on any lies or he’ll put a hit on my wife.
So what is the weather like on your planet this time of year? :rolleyes:
I’m not touching the rest of this post with a ten foot pole, BUT . . .
Wasn’t Lincoln a Democrat by today’s political standards? If you asociate past political parties with what we have today (basically conservative/liberal), you’ll find that party names and ideologies don’t always match the current system we have. Republicans during Lincoln’s time were the “bleeding-heart liberals” as today’s Democrats, and vice-versa.
So, in name, yes, the Republican’s have done some good. But they weren’t the Republican’s of today.
One of the few things I remember from History class.
DAMNIT. Take those spostrophes out, please.
AH! “apostrophes”
Bad night.
Well, no, Lincoln was somewhere to the right of Pat Buchanan. So were Douglas, McClellan, et al.. So were the great majority of politicians until the mid-1960s.
It’s possible to credit some of the “Radical Republicans” (mostly, although not entirely, from New England) with having views on race relations that would have passed as enlightened in 1954. They were only briefly in control of the party, however, and, by the mid-1870s, the North was tired of spending money and blood to try and suppress white Southern terrorism (Ku Klux Klan, Knights of the White Camellia, etc.) Plus, the attitude of Dixie towards blacks, whilst hardly anything that could be termed “racial equity”, was good enough for the time (the vast majority of Northerners were equally bigoted). Jim Crow didn’t really get rolling until the 1890s.
Well, it’s a free country, you see, and among the many freedoms people enjoy is the freedom to be a complete idiot.
I dunno, maybe she’s part of the crowd that feels All Guns Are Bad. Maybe she feels we should be able to reason with the poor, oppressed terrorists who have “issues” :rolleyes: Maybe she’s clueless. Maybe all of the above.
Every time I hear the term “Crypto-Fascist” I can’t help but think of the “Timeslides” episode of Red Dwarf. Which makes me want to giggle. Which really ticks off the people who use crypto-fascist in a serious manner.
I’m just trouble all around, I guess.
I imagine it’s somewhat similar to how I feel when there’s some horrific mass-shooting in, say, New Zealand where one lunatic massacres a couple dozen people and all the folks on the TV say things like “Well, I’d expect something like that to happen in America but not here…” A sort of hurt befuddlement - you don’t really think the whole country is like that, do you? - followed by the realization that provincialism is everywhere.
Traveling through Europe in the mid-late '80s, I always remembered the Caribineri in Italy. Two guys on patrol carrying MP5’s on chest harnesses and a definite look of “don’t fuck with us”. IIRC, this was also around the time of the height of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigade) shenanigans.
None of the Muslims I know were sent to Guantanamo. There’s quite a large population of them around here. We’re talking about fewer than a thousand people, almost all of them captured oversees fighting against our forces, as compared to six million Muslims living free in the United States.
I think accusations of fascism are pretty far-fetched.
While I agree that statements like that aren’t the nicest thing to say about your country, can’t you at least understand the sentiment behind it, though?
Mass shootings reported in the media here in Europe (and I’d imagine in NZ and OZ as well) tend to happen in the US in 90% of all cases, if I were to hazard a guess. In countries where gun ownership is restricted to the police, the army, and people who shoot for fun at a range, a snapping person killing a dozen coworkers is “an American kind of thing”, for better or worse.