You are happy where you are. That’s good.
Now, I do agree civil forfeiture is bullshit. Pardon my language.
Bully for you. On the other hand, when I go to Tesco’s for that Diet Coke (I’ll grant you I can’t easily pick up the other two items here), I won’t have the police following me home. Or stopping me arbitrarily. Or seizing my car. Or, ya know, shooting me dead.
So anyway, after you’ve changed the subject a few times, can you see that the American absolutist approach to free speech might possibly not be the best way to keep a society both free and stable?
This is a little disingenuous. I think you know what Fuji was asking: why is the unfettered ability of any citizen (not just you) to easily purchase firearms a good in and of itself? What is Europe and most of the rest of the first world missing that America has?
Thanks. And, mind you, it’s not that hard to get a legal rifle or shotgun here. Basically, if you live out in the sticks, you can just say you’re a farmer and you need to take out those foxes messing with your flock. This, I know. My best friend has both a legal shotgun and rifle and he’s never farmed a day in his life…
SCOTUS did though.
As Dropo pointed out in post #248, in 1942, the SCOTUS voted 9-0 restricting ‘fighting words’ that “inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace”
Bullshit.
That was the first time Trump was sued for housing discrimination. The second time, in 1982:
In April 1982, the Open Housing Center, a fair housing advocacy outfit, filed class action lawsuits against several landlords and real estate brokers on behalf of nine African Americans who had been denied apartments in Queens. (The Open Housing Center had years earlier provided the Justice Department with information used in the 1973 housing discrimination case against Fred and Donald Trump.) The defendants in these suits included Fred Trump and Coronet Hall Inc., a Trump company that owned an apartment building in Queens. Donald Trump was not named in the lawsuits, but at that point, he was an owner of Coronet Hall and a senior officer of Trump Management Inc., which controlled various Trump companies, including Coronet Hall.
Nothing ever changes. He was a racist and a scumbag then, he is a racist and a scumbag now.
New York Times:
Lost in the criticism of Trump’s “all sides” remark from all parts of the political spectrum yesterday is the far more damning context of his actions.
In May of this year, it was reported that the Trump administration had frozen $10 million in grants to community-based counter-extremism programs designed to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, especially lone-wolf attacks, by far-right and Islamist extremists. (Life After Hate, one of the programs described in the article, ultimately had their grant pulled).
If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump tried to eliminate the far-right counter-extremism program of the DHS entirely earlier in the year by replacing the Countering Violent Extremism division with a “Countering Islamist Extremism” program targeting only Muslims. This program includes both community programs and social media messaging to discourage radicalization.
But wait, it gets worse. The Trump administration wants to cut a further half-billion dollars from counter-terrorism programs in their budget proposal.
Good luck with this. I’m pro 2nd amendment and I couldn’t even explain to you why other than some vague shit about preventing tyranny. My mother once threatened me with the household shot gun, and I certainly would never allow one in my house, but I have no problem with nonviolent citizens owning them. You get a place like Michigan where I grew up and it seems like every household has them because everybody hunts. I was taught to safely fire one when I was thirteen years old. Gun ownership is so endemic to American culture and so thoroughly an American entitlement that you’re not going to get any traction on this issue. It’s also one of the few issues where a substantial portion of both right wing and left wing folks agree. The NRA has such a stranglehold on politics in this country that it’s actually illegal for the CDC to even research gun violence. Talk about suppression of liberty!
There is nothing rational about it, it is purely an emotional issue and probably harkens back to our relatively recent birth as a nation and the many times citizens have been called upon to bring up arms against people trying to fuck with us. We are a weird country and the conflicts we have today are essentially the same conflicts of yesteryear. You want to start a civil war in this country? Try to take away people’s guns. I’m certain it’s one of the few issues over which large swaths of the American population would actually murder each other. I am dead serious. People go absolutely fucking apeshit over gun rights in this country. The US is an incredibly violent culture relative to other developed nations.
Is it a net good? Probably not. But it is a civil right that’s never, ever, going to change.
[QUOTE=enipla]
As Dropo pointed out in post #248, in 1942, the SCOTUS voted 9-0 restricting ‘fighting words’ that “inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace”
[/QUOTE]
And in the 1970s the courts ruled that advocating for genocide through the use of the swastika doesn’t constitute ‘‘fighting words.’’ They determined that ‘‘fighting words’’ should be restricted to speech directed toward specific individuals.
I learned that yesterday. From here.
In Charlotte, a gang of 'alt rights" beat a black teen with heavy sticks right by the police station.
In Charlotte, an “alt right” ran down a crowd, murdering one person.
Let’s stop pretending this is about free speech, because it isn’t.
The reports and video clearly show who the agressors are. Their own words and speeches and flags tell us who they are… and the guns they were carrying.
An interesting thougt here too…
It’s the South. If anyone other than Nazi white people did this, how many would have been clubbed, tasered, and shot by the police???
How come in THIS case, no police were “in fear for their lives” while these Nazis attacked and killed someone?
I’d hesitate to accuse the authorities themselves of racism. As I understand it Charlotte is really liberal and pretty much everyone was disgusted by the presence of white supremacists. Their primary sin seems to have been being woefully unprepared or the level of conflict that would ensue.
OK, it was probably an unfair question.
I mean, the South has racists and Nazis for sure, but imagine what it would be like to live in that area and be a perfectly normal, decent human being, and then have to deal with a bunch of scumbags coming in to publicly fuck up your reputation in the eyes of the world.
It’s also a little bit misleading because it gives the impression that racism is a southern thing. I grew up in the Midwest, the north, a yankee, in an environment that was profoundly racist. I had two grandfathers in the KKK, one of which probably murdered people, the other of which was the sheriff of the lovely Howell, Michigan that has been in news recently for its virulent racism. The moment I met my grandmother’s second husband, when I was maybe twelve, the first words out of his mouth to me were ‘‘you better not date any niggers.’’ And in 1998, one of my high school best friends, who is half black, received a message written in her agenda that said, ‘‘Get out of this school, nigger, or this is the date you die’’ with a noose inscribed in one of the calendar days. 1998.
It’s interesting how some people can grow up in this country and never have witnessed anything like that. You know, when people are skeptical that racism is still a popular motivation for discrimination, and make claims that liberals see racism everywhere which makes them the racists – I mean holy shit, dude. I did see racism everywhere. I grew up in that. I’ve always been staunchly anti-racist (thankfully neither my mother nor father endorsed those views) yet I still struggle mentally with basic knee-jerk stereotyping bullshit because of the culture I grew up in. I was raised in a small town racist shithole in the north.
Racism is a cultural shame we all share.
Charlottesville, y’all, not Charlotte, unless there some new atrocity I’m not aware of.
And a big Thank You to SteveG1 for providing the examples that Clothy will ignore, probably because he can’t read the bigger words.
Shut the fuck up, Precious Snowflake.
Or in other words, “Build the Wall!” A copout for persona shortcomings and insecurities is pretty much Trump’s base. Racism and bigotry is not only a political viewpoint, it currently controls all three branches of the US government.
You know, to me, from outside, all the useful idiots arguing for free speech sound like ordinary Germans who don’t realize it’s *already *11 November, 1938.