Oooh!! Ooooooooohh!! Mista Kotta!! I know the answer!
It’s because he a sad, ass-ignorant little trollboy who enjoys stirring up shit, right?
Bj0rn? That you?
now andros, we can’t go around giving the correct answers in a thread like this. What would Hoe think?
Aside from the cranberry juice now adorning my keyboard, I thought the Welcome Back Kotter reference was priceless. If Hoe was capable of debating this rationally, [s]he wouldn’t have posted to the Pit.
[sub]Hmmm… perhaps I should take a rare visit to GD to make sure that [s]he hasn’t…[/sub]
[irrelevant historical nitpick/hijack]
The Emperor Nero ruled the Roman Empire between 54 and 68 C.E. This had nothing to do with the “Fall of the Roman Empire”–the period of the “Five Good Emperors”, the Pax Romana which was the Roman Empire’s greatest period of stability and peace (bearing in mind, of course, that it was still a dictatorial empire; then again, what large state wasn’t at that stage of history) occured after Nero’s reign, from 96-180. Even the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the subsequent disastrous reign of Commodus did not mean the “Fall of the Roman Empire”. The fall of the Empire in the West is usually dated, somewhat arbitrarily, in 476, over 400 years after Nero’s death. Furthermore, the Roman Empire in the East did not finally and completely “fall” for the last time until 1453 C.E.; and “Roman” governments ruled over the city of Rome and the Italian peninsula (albeit from afar) for considerable periods after 476.
Really, most people don’t seem to have any idea what the phrase “the Fall of the Roman Empire” entails. They think it has something to do with Nero fiddling while Rome burns and the Gladiatorial Games (which persisted for centuries before being suppressed by the by-then Christian Emperors several decades before the final fall of the Western Roman Empire)
[/irrelevant historical nitpick/hijack]
MEBuckner: There is no such thing as an irrelevant historical nitpick 
. Or so I keep telling myself 
.
- Tamerlane
i would like to take this opportunity to say that everything i have read posted by Hoe has been a piece of shit and a waste of my time.
im going to refer to him as “Ass-Hoe” from now on.
Thanks. It’s a shame I can’t do a creditable Horshack in text. I’m actually pretty good IRL.
What I think he’s talking about.
Hoe’s comment that we are governed by people who we did not elect is, I think, a reference to the federal bureaucracy and especially to the law enforcement and national security bureaucracy. Maybe a majority of the electorial collage was picked by people who voted for President Bush, but a majority of the people who voted on the question of whether Gov. Ashcroft should have a roll in government voted against that idea. Yet we find that all sorts of things are going on in the name of national security, such as the Patriot Act of 2001 and the executive order setting up military commissions, that we can be pretty sure were the product of some fevered brain in the US Department for Looking Under the Bed for the Boogie Man who no one ever voted for. Surely no one thinks that the President came up with this stuff on his own or that these were propositions that were submitted for the judgment of the people in the Presidential Election. No, the people were asked to vote on things like drilling for oil on the North Slope of Alaska, the privatization of social security, reduced taxes and whether Al Gore was too pushy and whether George W. ad the mother wit even read the Constitution let alone defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic. Now we have a government that seems to be hell bent on making some substantial changes in justice policy with little time to consider the ramifications and based to a great extent on xenophobia and popular hysteria. Those policy changes have been developed and will be implemented by people who are not answerable to any electorate.
So there.
The irony, of course, is that railing against the unaccountable federal bureaucracy has in the past been the province of the GOP.
While our elected officials make the laws we live by, they are interpreted and carried out by people that weren’t elected. That in itself can lead to trouble.
Of course, it’s much better than losing institutional memory every four years.
I don’t care what any of you guys say, you ignorant americans with your thumbs in your asses:
Bjork’s last album, although different, was quite good, Dammit.
I’m with Hamlet on this one.
What’s to prevent some southern fat-bellied Deputy Dog behind mirrored sunglasses from arresting a foreign tourist for doing 65 in a 60 zone and charge him with terrorism? The tourist will be locked up in solitary forever, with no right to a lawyer, no right to contact his embassy, no right to anything except being shot for “attempting to escape.”
Thomas Jefferson beleived alot in disagreeing with government policy, for that was the only way to keep the government in check.