If it takes someone years to explain why I should like something, it isn't worth liking. There are more productive uses of that time that are equally enlightening and enriching and don't require me to duck my head into the cesspool of pompous ramblings that is modern music education.
A violent, war-like culture?
Why do you have to bring the USA into everything?
You are just trying to pick a fight so don't be surprised when you get one.
That's what the video did too and they got a fight: the embassies being attacked. To then say that it is wrong and violence isn't the answer is being naive. In the real world, people respond to vocal provocation with physical force.
So it's justified if I'm at a bar and someone talks shit to me, for me to fly to whatever shithole you live in and beat your skull in with a hammer? Sound logic.
Meanwhile the libertarians argue that they can somehow create an economic utopia
That's a straight out lie.
What world line are you tunneling in from? In this one it's totally true.
You realize TNG started in the 80's, right?
In Texas judges are elected.
You're under the delusion that there is a difference between a 'government' and 'the people.'
Government is an emergent property of a system of two or more people. Just like people are an emergent property of the correct configuration of organic molecules.
Tuition is much higher now.
Your forcefields are good, but my teleporting is better.
Unalienable rights are unalienable by religions.
The concept of unalienable rights is a product of the 18th century and inextricably linked to religious belief: rights are inalienable because they are endowed by a Creator. Since modern societies find it increasingly unlikely that there is a Creator, that religious basis is no longer tenable and most of the West (with rising nations like China) now follows some variant of utilitarianism where rights are a convenient and mutable legal fiction to ensure general quality of life.
You've completely missed the substance of Enlightenment thinking and what the concept of "Creator" meant to most of the people who put this country together. More study needed.
"It's the same God".
Bah. Different holy books preaching different ideologies and virtues in the name of God. The Gods mentioned can hardly be called the same.
So basically, this is like All Star Superman, Red Son Superman, Old School Superman, and new 52 Superman? All the same character, just different canons?
The invisible wizard of Islam is, historically, the invisible wizard of Abraham: the invisible wizards of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are, as a matter of fact, one and the same.
True, but Islam is a pretty nasty fork of the original codebase.
So you're saying a bunch of people who don't know anything about the field all agree with each other, but because there are lots of them I should believe them. Then you offer me advice on how to be persuasive. I've come to accept that some people are just parrots who are incapable of thinking. I guess you're one of them.
Your argument breaks down, though, in that if it really were just a bunch of bad apples, their fellow cops would arrest them for breaking the law. Instead, they support their brothers in blue no matter how clearly obvious it is that a crime has been committed by someone with a badge. In so doing, they become accessories to those crimes and invalidate their own badges.
I'd really like to see, just once, a cop arrest another cop at one of these protests for excessive use of force. But not a one of them has the backbone to even try.
The President can refer something to the Justice department for review. Hell, they should just unleash Patrick Fitzgerald on these guys with a mandate to investigate all bribery and corruption in congress and unlimited funds to do so. That'd be fun for the whole family right there.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
