Marianne has a naked breast because it’s an allegory, you cretin

[Aeson]

Mr. Orange hair begs to differ.

He and his ilk are just another speedbump on the road of progress.

Even if he wanted to, he wouldn't be able to take away homosexual rights (at least not for very long), he wouldn't be able to undo civil rights, or force women back in the kitchen, and certainly couldn't bring back slavery. As terrible as Trump is, as many stupid things as he says, even he doesn't want to do any of those things. That's progress ... when the icon for stupid bigotry is still a far cry better than "normal" 100 or 200 years ago.

[Ben Kenobi]

I see all religions as anti women. Including Catholicism. Grow up!

Except Islam, obviously.

[Ben Kenobi]

We aren't discussing a burkha ban. I was discussing the ban of any Muslim headgear in France. Learn how to read illiterate.

I believe we are discussing a Burkha ban. If you support a burkha ban, then we're actually in agreement.

The Neo Nazis proclaim themselves as perfect Christians. Don't like it? Take it up with them.

Where? [[citation needed]] Hitler actually believed that Christianity weakened society by making society soft.

A fetus isn't a person. Stop acting as if it is.

It's a rather crucial point. If the unborn child is a person then about half of all unborn children are girls and that's a lot of girls being killed by abortion.

What IDs? Specialized voter ids? Out half of the day? Poll tax! And out half of the day? You realize people can't even afford to take half of day off work! You are just totally wrong as usual!

:shrug: It's not a poll tax, and yes replacing. and getting your driver's license takes time. Fact of life.

Specialized voter IDs are usually even more than state IDs and are simply a poll tax. You hate the working class and you don't want them voting.

[Elok]

Okay, you're missing the bloody point; I'm not-repeat-not complaining about technology. That part is cool. And arguments with you inevitably turn into frustrating battles over . . . terminology, or philosophy, or something. I don't even know what, but we talk past each other's heads. Please just let me talk to BeBro et al here.

[Aeson]

You're free to respond or not.

You claim modernity has forced negative effects like the widely reported "breakdown of the family". I am giving examples of how those negatives aren't actually a result of modernity or individual freedom.

The reality is that there have been even worse family situations in the not so distant past, but families "stayed together" because the woman had no choice. Divorce is a much better option than what essentially amounted to slavery to an abusive husband in far too many cases.

I don't buy that modernity created the problems, as they existed before and are not endemic now.

[Elok]

Okay, I'm sort of thinking out loud here, so what I post may be inchoate and ill-defined. Fair warning.

If you look at European life many centuries ago, one of the most obvious differences in terms of social structure is that life was much more locally oriented. Any given middle-class person was bound to a number of different local groups: not just a family but a church, a trade/craft organization, and local government bodies of one kind or another. You would have both rights and responsibilities within each sphere, and each collective would have substantial power of its own, which gave it the ability to serve as a counterweight to central state authority.

Over the years, the scopes and powers of each of these groups have steadily withered away. In a sense, this makes people more free, in that they have essentially no obligations beyond paying taxes and sundry other duties to the main state, but it also removes structure from their lives and takes away their power to collectively heft their weight. Replacements for the old groupings--labor unions, various civic groups from the Shriners to the Rotary Club, sundry other organizations--have largely died off or become irrelevant. New tech like Facebook allows ad hoc voluntary groupings, but the ease of their formation and dissolution renders them fairly trivial as far as social influence goes. And the sheer influx of information makes it very difficult to focus people's attention for long on any one thing the way a structured organization can.

Arendt argued that one of the prerequisites for totalitarianism is a classless society, where people are sufficiently atomized that they can be shuffled around like cards as needed, since society lacks the internal structure to resist. Now, obviously we're not living in a universal totalitarian state. But it's not coincidence that totalitarianism is a purely modern phenomenon. Not because of technology--Robespierre made a good go of it, almost by accident, in preindustrial France--but because previous despots invariably had obstacles to the centralization of power required. Medieval lords had to fight against twenty layers of competing feudal loyalties, plus the Church, town trade organizations and leagues, and god-knows-what kind of entrenched traditions.

Even on the eve of Revolution, France was a mess of archaic institutions tied up in a knot. Not all of these groups were good; in fact, most were self-interested bloodsuckers relentlessly angling to accumulate as many privileges as possible for themselves and their members. But they were obstacles to arbitrary rule, a kind of organically grown checks-and-balances. The Revolution swept them away to reorganize them rationally--then turned briefly totalitarian, flopped around pathetically when that ran out of steam, and eventually got coopted by a more conventional dictator.

At the heart of it all was the idea of human beings as autonomous individuals who associate voluntarily. As Burke pointed out almost immediately, this is rubbish; our most significant associations are not voluntary at all. Nobody chooses their blood relations, very few choose their country, and we're very constrained as to employment. We can choose our spouse (but increasingly we don't marry at all), and our friends (who are much more ephemeral). That's it. Human beings evolved in small, intimately connected clans. Now we've destroyed the clans, and we're just lonely monkeys wandering at random around the Serengeti.

The only group left is the central state, which has smoothly assumed more and more power over the years. Well, no. There's the state, and various large corporations, who (in America, at least) are forever buying themselves a larger stake in it. Much like old civic groups in France, except those at least cut a hunk of the pie for their middle-class followers. The interest-purchasing powers of the modern corporations favor themselves and their stockholders, who increasingly come from more and more rarefied heights as our own middle class dies. Which it does because it has no muscle of its own left. It doesn't help that single parenting is now the actual norm; the majority of new mothers are now unwed.

[Giancarlo]

Except Islam, obviously.

I see all religions as antiwomen. ALL. CAn you read?

[Aeson]

I'm saying there are many local groups still, including strong family groups. You seem to be stuck in a depressed worldview where everything good is gone. Never before in history have such a wide swath of humanity had so much input into how they run their own lives or enjoyed such a high standard of living.

Unions still have significant sway, as do various professional lobbies, ideological lobbies, etc. State and local governments still have significant impact on their residents' lives.

Also you are treating corporations as one monolithic block in lockstep with each other and government, whereas they are generally in competition with each other and in a struggle with governments ... and thus present the same difficulty to consolidate power you claim no longer exists.

Issues like net neutrality show clearly how some large corporations oppose others while having at least some capacity for swaying government to their will. To get all the major corporations to line up and accept a totalitarian government isn't likely to happen.

[Giancarlo]

I believe we are discussing a Burkha ban. If you support a burkha ban, then we're actually in agreement.

No I absolutely do not. Either you ban all religious hats/headgear or none.

Where? [[citation needed]] Hitler actually believed that Christianity weakened society by making society soft.

[[[Citation needed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]]]]

When you make stupid claims like that you better back yourself up.

Highly wrong though. Hitler was in bed with your church and the church was complicit in helping him. The Catholic Church not only helped Hitler, they also supported Mussolini and Francisco Franco.

Hitler himself cited Christianity and god multiple times throughout his speech and that they needed to be throughout society. Sounds very Christian to me.

It's a rather crucial point. If the unborn child is a person then about half of all unborn children are girls and that's a lot of girls being killed by abortion.

Spoken like a true christian fanatic who disregards science. You have no clue what you are talking about.

:shrug: It's not a poll tax, and yes replacing. and getting your driver's license takes time. Fact of life.

Who said anything about a driver's license? Why not just have one instead of imposing another ID on people forcing them to pay for it? Your ideas are idiocy, unconstitutional and have been struck down by the courts in recent times.

If it was for free, it wouldn't be a poll tax... But these specialized voter IDs are definitely a poll tax and cost quite a bit of money. For a family struggling they would rather not spend on yet another ID. By the way, there are also state IDs and those are cheap. And not hard to get. Working class people who don't own cars, can use them instead. All that is requires is a photo. In California the cost is minimal. In other states, the specialized voter ID is often many times more expensive. Even more expensive than a drivers license. In other words, you want to limit people from voting. You are anti democratic.

State IDs aren't a poll tax because they have multiple purposes. And of course one should also be able to bring in freely issued identification from the government (such as birth records).

[Elok]

State governments are steadily losing power; education and social services, for example, are increasingly subject to central control. They are nominally independent, but in practice so dependent on strings-attached federal funding as to have little freedom. Unions are weaksauce compared to what they used to be. Lobbies mostly represent powerful moneyed interests, e.g. the NRA (gun manufacturers), AIPAC (a foreign state), CAIR (multiple foreign states), and various "trade groups" (upper management and shareholders of megaconglomerates, all from the upper classes). Conservative religious interest groups, which actually are somewhat grassroots, have been losing for fifty years, as I said in the thread that got eaten, and generally by non-democratic means such as the courts. There is no interest group for the middle class, let alone the lower classes.

Which is why this election cycle we saw revolts from dissidents in both major parties. The one was crushed by a pet of the bankers and the MI complex, who is widely despised but will probably still win because her opponent (the successful "dissident") is a crypto-fascist so blatantly inept and insincere that even his own supporters don't honestly believe he will do anything for them. It is quite literally a contest where both candidates are deeply disliked by the majority of the country, which is really quite odd for a democracy. This is not the behavior of a country where most people honestly believe they have a say. It's not catastrophic, no. But it's not stable nor healthy.

[Giancarlo]

People like Hillary more when she is working in an official capacity and not running for office it appears. She will win regardless. That immigration speech Trump gave was almost praising white supremacists. Latino Republicans hired onto his campaign all quit after that. These are people who said they supported him and liked that he was supposedly softening his tone. She is back up by 7% in the latest national poll and has regained bigger leads in key swing states. That's before his disastrous white power speech.

[pchang]

I see all religions as antiwomen. ALL. CAn you read?

Wiccan?

[Giancarlo]

Wiccan?

I don't know much about them. I have a friend who is wiccan.. Also trans. I guess I will ask her.

I guess I was referring to the major big cults. You know the ones that kill the most people. I don't think wiccans are responsible for wars like Christians, Muslims, etc.

[Elok]

It's true that I'm a very cynical, even morbid person. But I think it's significant that the most lively and novel expressions of both the American left and right have, in their separate ways, rejected liberalism. On the one hand, you have the "alt-right," who are so reactionary and bigoted as to make BK seem almost moderate. On the other, you have contemporary campus progressivism, which believes in thoughtcrime, characterizes dissent as violence or disease, and appears to be angling for some sort of race war. I believe both are only going to get stronger.

By the by, I don't believe things have gone all downhill. I believe all people, of all eras, are equally but differently terrible, with technological and economic progress masking our consistent moral mediocrity. I'm speaking here of the challenges of our own time.

[Ben Kenobi]

No I absolutely do not. Either you ban all religious hats/headgear or none.

So a law cannot draw an appropriate line where the law should be drawn? Dumb.

When you make stupid claims like that you better back yourself up.

You first.

Highly wrong though. Hitler was in bed with your church and the church was complicit in helping him. The Catholic Church not only helped Hitler, they also supported Mussolini and Francisco Franco.

You said the Nazis, not the Fascists. Franco was not a Nazi. Please provide evidence that Hitler actually believed that he was a 'true' Christian.

Hitler himself cited Christianity and god multiple times throughout his speech and that they needed to be throughout society. Sounds very Christian to me.

Well then. Provide evidence so we can see the context.

It's a rather crucial point. If the unborn child is a person then about half of all unborn children are girls and that's a lot of girls being killed by abortion. Spoken like a true christian fanatic who disregards science. You have no clue what you are talking about.

The science of genetics, and the science of biology says that sex is assigned at conception. We know this because you can sex-select via in-vitro.

Fact of life. Who said anything about a driver's license? Why not just have one instead of imposing another ID on people forcing them to pay for it? Your ideas are idiocy, unconstitutional and have been struck down by the courts in recent times.

Because that's a retarded idea? You're really batting a thousand here. First, "all headgear or none", is a terrible statement. Nobody's arguing that, except for you. Two, "we should have only one ID". Uh, the right way to do this is to have a DL and an ID card. So people who cannot drive for whatever reason, can still get an ID card that doesn't have the same requirements as a DL.

If it was for free, it wouldn't be a poll tax... But these specialized voter IDs are definitely a poll tax and cost quite a bit of money.

I don't consider 20 bucks (which is what mine cost for a replacement), to be a substantial burden. Many jurisdictions will do the first one free.

For a family struggling they would rather not spend on yet another ID. By the way, there are also state IDs and those are cheap. And not hard to get. Working class people who don't own cars, can use them instead. All that is requires is a photo. In California the cost is minimal. In other states, the specialized voter ID is often many times more expensive. Even more expensive than a drivers license. In other words, you want to limit people from voting. You are anti democratic.

I have no problem with state IDs, except that some states like California don't require you to be a citizen to get one, which is why you support State IDs and not a federal one.

This has nothing to do with bleating, 'poll tax' and everything to do with permitting non-citizens to vote. Could you be anymore transparent?

State IDs aren't a poll tax because they have multiple purposes.

LOL so requiring an ID isn't racist unless it's done by the federal government. LOL.