ScottSA

"science denier?" Are you suggesting that psychology is a science? Only uneducated people would come close to saying that. Psychologists would be the first to "deny" that they are scientists. Do you even know what a scientist is? What do you think we used to do in the Faculty of Political 'Science?' Psychology is science only insofar as it attempts to seek truth. So far it has found very little of it, and certainly no absolutes.

I take it you are throwing common sense to the winds then, lest it smack of racism? Truly you wouldn't even make it through boot camp, never mind ever having a hope of becoming an officer. I doubt you've ever had a job.

You are no more an officer than my 9 year old daughter. I know all about officers and you ain't one. In fact, you're scum for trying to pretend you're one.

Note that everything is about "you." It's a shame we're losing the sense of duty and sacrifice that made this country the way it is, so that you don't have to worry about your safety or your next meal.

No officer would say that about his men. No officer would laugh at a kid constrained by discipline who peed his pants. You were no officer and if you claim to be you're a liar. Besides, you're too stupid to be an officer. That makes you a fool and a liar.

No, I think the "racism of the time" made them scoff at it, actually, since the agreements of various extended families in a stone age hunter gatherer...errr..."society" have little or no relevance to a continental constitutional democracy. It's the same "racism" aka "common sense" that makes most people laugh at the idiocy of the idea.

I think you're failing to make the distinction between playing a victim hand and using it to justify sloth and and/or violence. One can do the first but not the second; the two are not synonymous.

Naturally, we can dismiss everything Indians say then, given that they are mostly *snort* "oral traditions."

I really think Jennie is a troll. Why else would someone continually put out purely indefensible and ignorant comments and then blithely skip away to start up on a different thread?

I'm sorry you find it hard to reply with any substance, but do be a good chap and bugger off without displaying your ignorance quite so publically.

Because the Jews have a secret plan to run the world, and they steal all the money and sacrifice Christian babies. Haven't you heard? But in all seriousness, some Jews DO play the victim card, and have in fact overplayed it in the case of the holocaust. I believe that a great deal of the latent anti-semitism on the left has come into being, in Europe at least, as a result of the neverending glorification of holocaust victimhood. Jews are not the only ones who suffered genocide, yet were an extraterrestrial to skim through late 20th century western history books, he would quite likely come away convinced that the Jews were the only ones. Having said that, I believe you are not only talking about victimhood per se, but about using it as an excuse to lie down and quit, and on that point I strongly agree. The Jews have suffered far more than the Palestinians, yet the Palestinians prefer to snivel and fire rockets than to get on with life, while the Jews do the opposite. The Jews have built a state with a fraction of the resources available to the Arabs, and have made it shine besides the backwards third worldism of the rest of the region. Jews excel in every country they go to, whether they are oppressed or not. Maybe it's because their leaders don't convince them they are second class, maybe it's because they are raised better...who knows...but there is a real difference.

I suppose next you'll claim that the feminist movement was started by precolumbian Alt-Amazonian squaws and Steinem learned it from them? Did the Indians invent cars too? Just wondering, you know, since they supposedly invented the US Constitution. Anyway, back at the ranch, the presence of women warriors would cut the time from first bullet to "run away! run away!" down to seconds.

Rue, this is a very ornate and piously organized apologia for Indians, but you seem to miss the point that it is precisely the alleged "legal issues," based on collective RACIAL characteristics -themselves often based on a specious re-interpretation of treaties long before satisfied to the letter - that has caused this problem. People like Jennie, who is obviously an Indian activist even though she claims to be white, have found that it's very lucrative for them to become indignant and keep this kettle boiling as long as possible; even when it means they are contemning their own people to a life steeped in victim mentality and alcohol. Yeah, it's a real problem, but they have it, and if they are going to continue claiming that "the white man," who is responsible for few of their problems but all of their luxuries, is the cause of it, you can hardly be surprised when people call them on it and get angry. As far as spiritual insights, go back beyond history and you'll find the same ones that underwrite your own religion, BEFORE they evolved beyond worshipping everything that moved. You have too good a mind to fall into this blind liberal apologia for the darker side of truth.

I'm sorry you're not able to understand the nuances Jerry.

I take it you have decided to become a French Film Producer?

We've all seen it. We all know what this is about. Trying to dress up a bunch of occasionaly sober thugs in discarded camous and paint them as heroic "warriors" is just plain funny. They'd last about 5 minutes of hot firefight with a platoon of disciplined infantry before they turned tail and hid behind their girlfriends' skirts. They are nothing more than idiots who now have what they see as a viable excuse not to have a job.

Judging from the content of these various spammed threads, I imagine that's not something you're entirely unfamiliar with.

Yes.

Yes.

There is no "debate." There's nonsensical revisionism and there's historical accuracy. One cannot simply posit ridiculous notions and then announce that there's a "debate." In all too many cases revisionism has been flogged so vociferously that it has become a truism, like the idiotic notion that colonialism was conducted entirely for "profit" and never gave anything back to the colonialized nation, or that treaties carried out to the letter decades ago should be re-opened and re-interpreted in the 21st century. The US constitution evolved over a millenium of thought that could only have come about as a result of the particular history of the west. Factors like the Black Plague, which in a flash decimated the population, astronomically inflated the value of labour and the labourer, and led, eventually, to the rise of technological innovation and humanism; the enlightenment; the reformation; are only some of the myraid events and processes that the US constitution arose from, but one of the processes we can be sure it didn't arise from was the honored-in-the-breech tradition of a proto-political gang of stone age hunter-gatherers.

My point is that I seriously doubt that number and the definition of what exactly is going on. Most evangelical Christians by definition WILL "push" their religion, but whether that becomes coercive through chain of command is extremely questionable.

That I think says better than anything I ever could about why the west is in decline. Abrogating the classical sense of duty to self interest, and then actually celebrating it as morally just is the hallmark of any society at its crest. It's a shame.

Eeerrr...can you explain that statement, since it bears no resemblence to either the Vlaams Belang or SIOE? How did a Flemish secessionist party get to be a "racial" party? Or is it just that every time you see "german" you think "fascist?"

Oh it's hardly an inaccuracy, nor is it out of bounds. Islam slaughtered Jews wherever they were across the middle east, Persia and Anatolia. Just because the west wasn't there to write about most of it doesn't mean it didn't exist. Where are the Jews if they were treated so well? Why did they flee to the west? Why are the remaining Jewish communities so small?And then lets talk about the conditions non-Muslims live under...scorned, disprportionately taxed, with no political power...lets not let a zeal for smoothing over the wrinkles of history get in the way of reality. And Buffy, according to the kindergarten sweetness and light your mindset would have society live in, we are supposed to "use our words" instead of our hands...a prescription that seems to hold with the S&L crowd only so long as the "words" are along nicey nice lines. Islam is a death cult. More than that, it's a worldly ideology that happens to celebrate the next life more than this one. And that would be fine...a lot of Christians celebrate the life to come too...but the difference is that Christians aren't told that living in the afterlife requires that they kill the infidel. The only law abiding Muslim is a bad Muslim who chooses to obey civil law over religious law. If you had read the Koran...any one of 4 or 5 widely accepted translations...you'd know that. It is not like other religions. Its like the old testament on steroids. If Christianity had posited a Christ on horseback beheading his enemies, sacking caravans, raping widows and little girls, pogroming and enslaving 2 entire tribes of Jews and generally carrying on like a 7th century Vinnie and the boys, THEN you could claim similarities. But it doesn't...the Christian message and the message of Islam are radically different. Any nicey nice passages in the Koran are abrogated by the death cult passages that follow them ("abrogation" being the the psychopath's explanation for why God changed his mind from nicey nice when Modog had no power to vile and murderous when he got power). Whereas the Jews have modified their beliefs to accomodate the time period in which they live, Islam is still living in the 7th century, taking the word of a psychotic butcher literally.

Jennie and microdot were thrilling yesterday at the idea that breech clouted savages with stone tools had endowed the framers of the US Constitution with their political system, by posting the usual cut and paste revisionism that usually comes out of the fringe humanisms like "womens studies" or in this case "native studies." They posted a piece by some staff writer of a paper and then sat back and gloated, so I posted a rebuttal that seems to have been missed...so should I be given to understand that it's now my turn to gloat, or would either like to address this repost: Yeah, this myth has been floating around feel good liberal circles for a while, popping up now and then with citations to a tenuous link between Franklin and the Iroquios federation. It's based on the same sort of coincidental misread as troothar notions; there were "squibs", for instance, in the WTC while it was collapsing, and there are "squibs" when a building is demolished by set explosions; ergo the WTC was demolished by explosives. It's rot, and so is this. It's like looking at a round war shield and claiming the Indians invented the wheel. For Christ's sake, the Anglo-Saxon Witan was closer to the US Constitution than the Iroquios federation. So, for that matter, was the Roman Republican government. But hey, don't believe me; here's someone even more authoritative than the "Washington File Staff Writer" you cited, as hard as that may be to believe: "Abstract: The Iroquois Confederation was not an influence on the U.S. Constitution, but it is worthy of study as an independently developed political system with the oldest surviving constitution in North America. A systematic institutional analysis of the Great Binding Law, the orally transmitted constitution of the Confederation, reveals, among other things: tribal inequality despite their formal equality under a unanimity rule; a high level of responsiveness despite a nondemocratic, elitist method for selecting leaders; many ancillary institutions for achieving a traditional form of consensus rather than simple majority rule; two means of elevating men to the Confederation Council, each a paradoxical blend of the pre political and the post-traditional;..." http://radicalreference.info/node/1011 Or, if you don't like that, here's a wiki article that cites several well known historians: "The Iroquois nations' political union and democratic government has been credited by some as one of the influences on the United States Constitution. However, that theory has fallen into disfavor among many historians and is regarded by others as mythology. Historian Jack Rakove writes: "The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois." Researcher Brian Cook writes: "The Iroquois probably held some sway over the thinking of the Framers and the development of the U.S. Constitution and the development of American democracy, albeit perhaps indirectly or even subconsciously... However, the opposition is probably also correct. The Iroquois influence is not as great as [some historians] would like it to be, the framers simply did not revere or even understand much of Iroquois culture, and their influences were European or classical - not wholly New World." http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:ie5Jur...cd=11&gl=ca So if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy to think that stone age savages invented the US constitution, have at it, but you might as well posit that it came from Atlanteans after a long swim. Why the universities put up with this revisionist crap, based on one or two lines sprinkled here and there in memoirs, usually NOT saying what they are claimed to say, and a single pro forma visit by a bunch of Iroquios chiefs who happened to be in town one day, is beyond me.