I can't judge that without knowing what's in your heart, what your intentions were and why you held them.

All I can say for certain is: if I rushed to make a judgment without that information, I would become what my previous post was so clearly against. That was my point.

In American legislation, you're not supposed to grasp the principle. You're supposed to keep trying many different iterations on it, until there's a War on Everything. How else are we going to dictate to people how they shall live?!

Please reconsider doing this. The infantile, emotionally reactive, spiteful imbeciles who would make serious accusations against your character while feeling no real burden of proof don't deserve this sort of concession or accommodation. It validates them and lets them know they have influence; they deserve neither. Let them live their miserable lives of vocal desperation. Let their appetite for someone else to be "wrong" so they can feel superior for a whole moment be starved. They were never interested in constructive criticism, but not feeding them this way is a constructive act you can perform for them.

Besides, these days absolutely everything and anything can be branded "racist". Soon the word will have no meaning and everyone will be so used to hearing it thrown around that it will gather no attention at all. Right now it's about halfway there. It once meant a belief that one group of people is genetically and inherently superior to another group, some time ago. Now it means "I don't like what that guy says but I lack the sophistication, intelligence, and patience to be an individual who can explain what is wrong with, it so I'd rather act like a spoiled child and focus on group identity".

It's a shame that real instances of actual injustice that deserve to become known are probably getting lost in the noise produced by misuse of this epithet. Anyway, I respectfully urge you to reconsider catering to a bunch of puerile, broken individuals in the hope that they may yet reach emotional adulthood.

If management wants the power in the form of the final decisions (which they have), and the ability to take most of the credit (which is often the case), then they also get to keep the responsibility.

Sounds fair to me. Power and responsibility should never be separated. Ever.

It's amazing the way someone can believe in an absolutely omniscient, allmighty God Who completely knows the past, present, and future, Who endowed mankind with intellect and reason ... and then think this God had no idea mankind might use and apply that intellect and reason. How do people rationalize such beliefs?

If I were on the jury I'd refuse to convict those guilty of assault, provided they used no (improvised) weapons and stopped once their point had been made.

It's a shitty sign of the times that, so often, you can no longer politely ask someone to stop being annoying. They'll get "offended" and belligerent instead of being enough of a person to recognize that you had cause. Accepting a legitimate and polite correction is now viewed as a sign of weakness or submission. That's the cause of a great deal of violence, in fact nearly all violence that is not state-sponsored.

The social fabric is currently as unsustainable as the financial edifice of society. It makes me wonder if it will change course. What you said about impulse control has everything to do with having a little discipline and personal responsibility (it wouldn't take much). These things aren't "fun" or "entertaining" to acquire so more and more people can't be bothered. Am I alone in witnessing how tragic this is? Assholes with phones here, idiots gathering to chat and blocking doorways there, someone running off the road (or over the median) because their call or burger or makeup is more important to them elsewhere -- these little things are merely symptoms.

The part that bothered me back in high school is that they were never satisfied I had learned the fundamentals. Long after I had those down, years afterwards, I was forbidden from using advanced calculators for various tests and exams. I was treated as an imbecile who had no personal stake in his own education and betterment, to be trained and drilled rather than taught and instructed. Make no mistake, this is conditioning for subservience. I wish more people saw this for what it was and rejected it as I have done. I do not wish to be anomalous or unique or special in this regard. It is not a status symbol for myself. It is a lament for the masses.

It's the difference between knowledge and understanding. Our society often fails to value the latter, since it is not immediately useful in the short-term and requires a wise long-view to appreciate. This is very much to our collective detriment.

Perhaps your anger (or passion, if you prefer) is supposed to make you more convincing. It only actually makes you appear more malicious and less reasonable. The more important and close-to-home the subject is, the more critical it is not to succumb to such petty temptations.

That's American culture. I am reminded of that each time someone in a car pulls out in front of me, nearly causing an accident, when a five-second wait would have left the entire road to himself. Any sort of kindness or patience is viewed as submission and subservience, it would seem.

The failure of course is a simple misunderstanding. Kindness and patience are about what sort of person I am, not what sort of person the other guy is.

Actually Republocrats are the fascists, and Surprise! Demicans are the fascists too. You really don't understand how "good cop, bad cop" is played, do you? Polarization and transfer (or confusion) of identity are key components. It shuts down critical thought and scrutiny by drowning it out in a frenzy of "us against them" tribalism. It's really very simple for something so terribly effective and generally unnoticed.

This is where I depart from the licentious anything-goes lazy people who like to say things like "well you know languages evolve over time, so no matter how badly we misunderstand and misuse a word, it's always correct because we will claim it's an evolution of language!" Sometimes the correct way of doing something is the correct way and anything else is a failure, and it's too bad if someone is so self-important and haughty as to get offended by that.

The "nothing is ever wrong, just different but equally valid at all times no matter what" mentality leads to Orwellian Newspeak. It's the inevitable conclusion and it does not depend on the intentions of anyone participating in it.

Don't you worry. There's a concerted, intense, yet subtle effort to make the general (uninformed, won't do their own research) public believe that each and every "libertarian" is the exact same thing as an "anarcho-capitalist". Got to make sure the whole freedom-loving movement doesn't catch on and become popular, you know, and to make sure of that it must be demonized as emotionally and unreasonably and quickly as possible. When people otherwise sympathetic to the desire for freedom are hesitant to call themselves (small 'l') "libertarian", the job is done correctly. Various political and monied interests will take care of that, not openly through argumentation, but through portrayal, framing, and association. It's the same way any smear campaign is done.

For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that Coulter is a high-strung bitch and that there are already too many people like her. But if the Devil himself says that two plus two equals four, I would have to concede it was correct. That doesn't mean I agree with the Devil on any other issue or support him in any way. You can't get very far in these discussions if you get caught up in the personalities involved. Constructive discourse vanishes at the point where someone does that.

People only call Obama a "commie" because he is expanding an already powerful and far-reaching government, and people have come to associate Communism with out-of-control governments. Yes, Communism is one method and fascism is another and there are others still that produce the same kind of society. I understand that, but this is the way it's meant when most people call him a Commie. They're not evaluating the tenets of Karl Marx and applying them to modern poltiics; they're scared of this man.

The mass media certainly is bought and paid for. It's owned by the people who put both Democrats and Republicans into office, who fund campaigns, who make or break presidents and congresscritters. Do the research sometime and you'll find that various banking interests and others routinely fund both candidates. Why, it's as though they have the same level of control either way so they don't have to care who wins...