FUCK YOU I WOULD IF I COULD

This. Allah must be a sorry, sad little emo kid of a god if he is worried about what people are saying about him on Twitter. "Guys, stop talking about Muhammad on Twitter, we all know how sensitive Allah is -- he tried to overdose on Tylenol when that big bully in Denmark drew those cartoons!!"

Bring on the blasphemy, it's the only way we can fight this bullshit.

Dude, seriously? Sure, there are places in the world that are not in the Middle East that also repress speech. Should the Germans GTFO with their anti-speech laws? Of course they should. This does not, however, give the Muslim world a pass for their repression. This argument strikes me as one that a petulant toddler would make; "But Mom... Billy was playing in the mud too!!" It really rings hollow and adds very little to the conversation.

FMAI (Fisherman's Association of Israel): WTF PIRACY

Maybe we should start translating science books into these new languages instead, so that the people get something that is of actual value, rather than more religious bullshit.

I grew up Christian, and was terrified of the proposition that there potentially was no God and no greater plan for me. Once I gave up the illusion, however, I found an amazing sense of freedom in the realization that there is no "master plan" for my life, and there is no preordained purpose in the world. All this meant to me was that it was up to me to create my own purpose, and to invent my own meaning. To me, this makes life infinitely more interesting and rewarding than just following the straight and narrow path that God and Jeebus set up for me.

Really? You clearly haven't read it then. It boils down to this:

God created intentionally created humans ignorant. God then commands humans not to become less ignorant. As humans were created ignorant by asshole God, they obviously can't know any better, so they eat the fruit and progress beyond their woefully subservient roots. God then condemns ALL OF HUMANKIND TO ETERNAL TORMENT BECAUSE TWO PEOPLE ATE A FUCKING APPLE.

Then, God decides that women need a little bit of extra punishment, because fuck women, that's why.

Shortly thereafter, this omnipotent, omniscient God KILLS EVERYTHING ON THE PLANET because, apparently, not even being all-powerful can keep you from cocking things up now and again.

Once humanity gets back on its feet, God sends his chosen people on a mission to ETHNICALLY CLEANSE the promised land, raping, pillaging, murdering, and basically committing every war crime we have on the book for a few hundred pages.

God then decides that the best way to save humanity is somehow to send himself down to Earth to be horrifically executed in public. He couldn't just, you, know, forgive us. Imagine if your dad decided that he was going to forgive you for crashing his car, but first you had to watch him brand himself with a hot poker, just for you. Pretty fucked up, right?

Even after all of this, the prime directive is still to worship the divine asshole dictator in the sky; you can spend your whole life treating everyone around you BETTER than you treat yourself, and you will still be cast into a lake of fire for not believing.

When you boil the Bible down to its basic essence, it is every bit as vile as Mein Kampf, if not more so. While there are some nice, happy little sayings in there, they do little to redeem the overwhelming monstrosity of the rest of the text.

Furthermore, it's not the recording engineer who squashes it like that. While they may squash individual instruments with compression, it is the mastering engineer who applies the overall limiting to the mix.

I would say more like 99.999999%...

I would tentatively agree with you on this one. I say tentatively, because I do agree that when someone wants to do something entirely of their own volition, then it is not our place to say anything. Where this gets murky is where there is a culture of oppression. Case in point, the burqa. Many women claim that they choose to wear it voluntarily, but what does "choice" really mean when she will be perceived (and treated) as a whore if she doesn't wear it?

Yes, the story of The Jungle is a sad story in American History. While it did improve the meatpacking industry, the response by the average American had nothing to do with the deplorable treatment of the workers but "I am eating WHAT?!" People, at the end of the day, are only interested in their own personal self-interest. This is a sad, but true, fact that has haunted us through all of history.

This. I am so sick and tired of supposedly progressive people using tolerance to excuse horrific behaviors of other people around the globe. Yes, we do need to be tolerant of the cultures of others. If another culture wants to eat dogs, so what? We eat cows and pigs. Unfortunately, many people on the left, most of whom are otherwise quite intelligent and have very finely tuned moral compasses, take this argument WAY too far. Muslims want to force their women to dress in cloth bags? Heeey, who are we to say that we're better than they are? Tribes in Africa removing the clitorises of their little girls? Well, you know, they just do things a little bit differently... It is bullshit. We can (and need to) respect the rights of other cultures to do things in their own way, but that doesn't mean that there is no valid concept of universal morality. It is ALWAYS wrong to treat one gender/class/race as less than human. I don't care how many generations of your ancestors did it that way, or what your holy book says. This does not fall afoul of our need to respect cultural differences, it is simply a fulfillment of our obligation to our fellow human beings.

Are you retarded? I don't mean that as an insult, I just honestly feel that you may have some sort of mental deficiency to be spouting nonsense like that. We need to make them fear us more? When they have shown that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and strap bombs to their chests? You are talking about people for whom death is not an obstacle -- dying by our hand will only send them back to Allah. While we might be big and scary, we are never going to be bigger and scarier than Allah is to them. Unfortunately, there is really no simple answer as to what needs to be done in the Middle East. Even without our intervention, it would likely still be a big shitty mess, but we have done our best over the last half century or so to make it as shitty as possible for everyone involved. The animosity we have created will not go away any time soon, so just trying to be nice now will (understandably) ring quite hollow to these people. There may be some things that we can do to help them out, but at the end of the day, I think that the best we are going to be able to do is to board the windows and wait for the people to decide that they are sick of all the bullshit and create a free Middle East. I would even go so far as to say that we are seeing the beginning stages of it now, but it is still far too early to tell. Either way, trying to make them fear us will only make everything much, much worse.

You are simply deluded. For a candidate to get to the point where they are even a viable candidate in the primaries, they are already bought and paid for. I don't know how this problem can be fixed, but the corruption runs far too deep for it to be fixed at the voting booth.

With the amount of money that it takes to be a viable candidate for the office of the president of the United States, you can be sure that anyone you see on the ballot was bought and payed for long before you had any say in the matter. Couple this with the corporate collusion in media ownership to take care of 'outliers' (not that I agree with everything he says, but look at the time Ron Paul was given in debates in relation to his poll numbers), and you have a system where we really don't get a choice at all.