ScottSA

I think there is some confusion here as to what who is saying. Remember that these people had no points of reference, and "democracy" simply meant "rule by the demos". To many minds of the day, 'democracy' was no different in effect from mob rule, or alternatively 'tyranny of the majority', as Mills would have it. But that doesn't mean that Rebuplicanism is NOT democracy, because it is. Communism, for instance, is a form of totalitarianism, just as republicanism is a form of democracy. Just because one can say the USSR is totalitarian doesn't mean one is claiming it's not communist. Both can be true simultaneously. Some people, like our resident conspiracy theorist and his fellow plotsniffers, like to twist the meaning of words so they seem to say things not meant. Buchanan on the other hand, is simply pointing out the distinction between mob rule and republicanisn. If he goes any further than this, he is off base. Listen to what Cooley is actually saying: "republican form of government was intended a government in which not only would the people's representatives make the laws and their agents administer them, but the people would also directly or indirectly choose the executive" He is talking about republican democracy. He is not talking about some form of 'archy' in which the people are ignored or ruled according to some Platonic form of 'order' or direction from above, he is describing representative democracy, which is still democracy under any but the most stringent purist definition.

Why yesterday I bought a milkshake at a drivethrough and much to my surprise, it was cold. But not just chilly cold, why it gave me brainfreeze. I'm going to sue. Damn Dairy Queen anyway. How dare they serve unreasonably cold milkshakes? I think lukewarm milkshakes would be far more responsible. What if the brainfreeze had made me stomp on the accerator in pain and mow down the busload of camera laden Japanese tourists crossing in front of me?

Well, they may be always wrong, but they are also mostly right.

This example is based on zero-sum thinking. The scenario of a house is key. There is only so much space available in your house and if a foreigner moves in, that means less space for you. Canadian and American history amply demonstrate that life is not a zero-sum game. A good marriage is perhaps better proof. I take it then that you are arguing that illegal immigration is a good and righteous thing?

ROTFLMAO!!! What's with the "facebook"?

Here's a very good answer: Because while it's nice and cuddly to build schools and pass out candy and flowers to school children, it wears thin if it's all taking place in a hot war zone. Allied forces didn't cross the Rhine with their arms full of candy of flowers on the lookout for children to feed and schools to build while the Panzers were firing at them from the opposite bank. I know Layton has never been within 100,000,000 miles of a bullet fired in anger, but one would think that this is a common sense proposition.

I think sharkman has answered the philosophical question about as well as I could, but to answer your more personal question, I am about as devout as Lenin, if by that you mean am I a member of a Christian Church. I am not. I send my kids to a private Catholic school, and they have all been baptized in the Catholic Church, but that's because I like the idea of having morality instiled in my kids from a young age. I once made a half-hearted attempt at joining myself, but the priest thought my reasons weren't quite up to snuff, after I explained that I liked the Church's stance on moral issues, but couldn't quite find anything else to say about it. My reasons for my stance on the acceptance of buggers and buggery are far more deeply philosophical than religious, and based on what I think is a good and fairly deep grasp of history; real history as opposed to the ahistorical revisionist relativism that semi-educated teachers fill kid's heads with in highschool these days. This forum reeks of it on some days when the wing is blowing from the left.

That makes Chicago in 1968 a civil war too. Whoda thunk it?

Ever been to war Woody? I bet not. Did your daddy get you out of it or did you just run away all by yourself? Nope have not been to a war. I did apply for air force, but did not qualify. So I have not seen combat. Just like most of you here. Including you there Sport. Your replies are ... can't exactly think of a word for this. Maybe someone can help me out on it. How in God's name do you possibly have the slightest idea what I've done or where I've been?

Of course. Every country has social misfits with grudges. But only the US makes it easy for them to get access to weapons that can be used to kill a large number of people in a short period of time.America's obession with guns kills - no matter how must you try to spin it and rationalize it. You should read the article I posted. It may not change your mind, but it is one of the better renditions of an alternate viewpoint I've seen in a long time.

Good grief, this is such a ridiculous argument. Of course the US is a democracy. It's not a pure democracy to be sure, but it is a representative democracy. The US is also a republic; the two terms are no more mutually exclusive than the terms 'communist' and 'authoritarian'. Both can be true simultaneously, and the US is a democratic republic. Max, you're taking a passage out of context that clearly refers to a distaste of pure democracy; a sort of rabble rule that many at the time were afraid of and later pointed to the French revolution as justification for. But there are two points to be considered: First, you are misreading what is meant by the passage, and second, even if it did say what you think it says, you cannot isolate what this or that original framer of the constitution said from what his colleagues said, because no one framer is responsible for the sum total of the constitution. What if one were to take Jefferson, isolate his fiery rants, and present them as proof that the US is a free for all with no government at all? It was a debate. The constitution is a result of that debate. It is a balance, and a brilliant balance at that, between unworkable purist democracy and the parliamentary monarchy they were leaving behind.

The blame lies with guns! Crick teh rink!

It is a civil war. US troops are just getting caught in the middle now. ScottSA You don't seem to recall the generals who told Bush that it is indeed a civil war. Bush replaced those generals. One of the dumbest things he has done. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6080300277.html Not sure how relavent this is, or how much truth there is in it buuuut. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2062426,00.html Sounds like Berlin Germany. Sounds like Jerusalem, Isreal. If the violence was that low (like McCain said then just a week later, 180 people dead in 4 seperate care bombs in Baghdad. I'd like to see videos of US troops freely walking the streets. Without their guns/trucks/ammo. I'd really like to see footage of all of Baghdad to show how peacefull it is. I'd like to see how those rebuilding projects are going. If the Iraqi government complains to the UN saying their numbers are not accurate, who is actually right here?? And please explain why? And then you can explain how anything release by the UN can be tagged as false statements. So the UN says no civil war? The Iraqi government is probably saying it is. Not one thing you presented indicates civil war, and in fact the general you sourced tacitly admits that there is not, in fact a civil war. You mentioned Jerusalem and Berlin. Were there civil wars in Jerusalem or Berlin? Must have been quick ones, because I didn't notice them.

If we were to leap through the streets flinging energy hither and yon in grand displays of lightning bolts serving no other purpose but that they look pretty, we'd not be changing our grandkid's inheritance one iota. There is more than enough energy on this planet and in the solar system for them and their grandkids and their grandkid's grandkids and so on till the sun explodes in supernova. Fossil fuels were cheap, available and usable because technology perfected their use. Now other types of energy will be exploited by the technology that will build upon the fossil fuel revolution. I really don't know what all the fuss is about. Nothing we do will destroy the planet unless we set out to destroy the planet with big hairy bombs. Nor is the planet going to melt in some idiotic global inferno warming fairy tale. Angsting over it is about as ultimately productive as angsting over nuclear winter or widespread love canalism. Been there, did that, cleaned it up.

Do you enjoy rewriting history or something... Let me guess, the white man has committed no wrong, and the coloured people are all evil and intent on destroying our great culture. Really get a grip bud, and stop thinking your more superior than everybody else because your a certain ethnicity and you happen to have a penis. I had really hoped you had forgotten about me. I have no desire to teach you anything anymore, so please go away.

what is good grief is that men are indulging in a cult of weakness. the women have change the way men operate, think and look at themselves - indulge in weakness is actually seen as strengh. cry if you may, show emotions, i love you for this, stay safe. k - got to go but will respond here later I was actually going to say that you were included in the "almost"; that is to say, you seem to get it. The 'feminization of society' is a term coined from feminist literature...something I spent a great deal of time studying in another life...and it comes specifically from standpoint and postmodern feminism. It started out with the idiotic liberal feminist notion that men are no different from women (the "unisex" ideas of the early 70s) and later, with the realization of the obvious: that women and men are not the same after all; it morphed into the later feminization attempts. In essence, the ideation of feminization of men originated with the standpoint idea that men tend to be combative while women tend to be consensual; a ridiculous proposition at best; and that therefore men should learn to live in harmony like women allegedly would if patriarchy didn't make them behave otherwise. As a subset of this notion is the postmodern idea that men/patriarchy represent rationality and women/matriarchy represent emotion, that men operate of the phallus and women of the womb, that men attack and women receive. All of which is pseudo-academic gobbledygoop for "women are better so men should be more like them". It's utter nonsense of course, and all the various attempts to change men have produced is a lot of mixed up men and scornful women. "Zero tolerance for violence" in the schoolyard, the campaigns against "bullying", and various other attempts to reform boys have done nothing but drive the schoolyard fistfight underground to re-emerge in the form of rape and gangs and gunfights instead. The current attempt to make celebrate homosexuality is just another offshoot of this quest.

It also has to do with a general lack of critical thinking skills that come along later in life. Some people never quite pick up on them, which is why some people don't understand the subtleties between terms used by the homosexual lobby or why those terms are used. Sophomoric and largely irrelevant arguments like the assertion that if homosexuality is genetic it must be ok, or the completely misleading argument that homosexual marriage is somehow a "right", are rarely seen as the foolishness they are by the so-called "progressives", who drift along watching the slippery slope slip by in perfect ignorance of the implications.

I take it this is an article of faith with you?

Excellent attempt to whitewash woody's faux pas. However, if someone said "Bushs' home state must be proud of him", and I were to pipe up with "Yeah, Alaska must be proud of him", would you make the same allowances for me and claim that I really meant that ALL of America was proud of him? It's unfortunate that some people can't admit it when they make a mistake. Not to point fingers or anything, but perhaps some people make so many mistakes that if admissions accompanied every single one, it would be one large series of statements and admissions? Perhaps that's the reason other people want to help pull one's irons out of the fire too.

I'm amazed that with all the theses about the feminization of society out there , that almost no one in this thread has the slightest idea what it actually means. Women are more competitive than men? Good grief!

Having government treat me as an equal in no way impacts your ability to raise your children in an intolerant atmosphere if that's your wish. But by drawing laws according to your beliefs, you would directly condemn my children to being orphans should I die young. That's some moral code. You are at perfect liberty, outside the institution of marriage, to arrange guardianship of your children with whomever you wish. That has nothing to do with marriage.

I have no time nor desire to parse through line item quibbles about each minor point of each sentence just to indulge in swealian wordplay, and I'm sure you have better things to do than write tomes that no one including me has time to read. I'll answer this one question, and then perhaps we can agree to avoid each other henceforth? 'Tolerate' means to not throw stones at, kill, maim or incarcerate. I tolerate homosexuals. 'Accept' means to welcome, to acknowledge as normal and everyday. I do not accept homosexuals. You ask what's in a word? That's the crux of this slippery slope. Homosexuals have been "tolerated" from the day homosexuality became legal. But it is a word that makes great propaganda, because it is used now to mean something different, while allowing the user to retreat to the original meaning in midstride whenever he is called on it. Every advance homosexuals attempt to make into hegemonic society is accompanied by much ballyhoo about "tolerance", when in fact every issue since the decriminalization of homosexuality is really about "acceptance", which is an entirely different thing. Most Canadians are willing to tolerate homosexuals and homosexuality in our midst. I suspect that most Canadians are not at all willing to accept homosexuality as "just another lifestyle", like yuppies or the military community. That's why homosexual activists take great care to fudge (no pun intended) the two meanings. Obviously, from your question, the ploy works well.

It's unfortunate that you feel it necessary to drag your kids into a debate about sexual preference, but since you have, let me say that gay marriages are a direct attack on my children's moral upbringing, so make no mistake that I take personally homosexuals loudly striving for social acceptance as well. There we have it then. You want to make it personal? It's personal to me as well and impacts directly on my children's upbringing. I tolerate homosexuality and that's all I have to do. I certainly don't have to "accept" it, and I don't have to bend over because someone doesn't like what I have to say about aberrent behaviour. In my opinion the only attacks on children's future are mounted by those who undertake to celebrate and normalise immoral and aberrent behaviour while subjecting their kids to it.

I suspect you're underestimating the power of victim politics and in particular racially driven victim politics in a culture all too ready to apologize for its past successes.

I'm proud to say I'm never a jerk. Never would I say something nasty to anyone ever even if I think they have the brains of a slug and the mental processes of a clay deposit. I sometimes catch myself thinking out loud though...