Unless you have a neighbour called Israel with no problems whatsoever in blowing the crap out said facility because it might be the eventual precursor to the hypothetic ability to create nuclear weapons that could be used to eventually destroy something.

Uh, no. It didn't, actually.

I think your confusing warheads with delivery vectors. Iran doesn't possess ICBMs. Even if they could get a bomb, they wouldn't be able to deliver it very far, most definitely not to the US. What about a radical raceocracy armed with nuclear weapons? Isn't that a threat as well?

lol
Isn't that exactly what I said?

Wouldn't an evil government look stupid until you finally realize it's actually evil?

But how does that not happen with a pure representative system? A lot of people seem to assume the only laws voted for in parliaments are laws that the majority of the population supports. I don't see that. I see quite the contrary: laws go to parliament first, and then the partisan groups start the public "education" campaign to mobilize the people to their positions. Hardly any law representatives come up with is proposed by the People, they come instead from interest groups and lobbies and more often than not they damage public interest. So, look at it as a lobbying system for the People.

I would consider those factor as requisites for any democracy.

Excuse me but, I fail to see how that is any different of what exists today. There will still be a Constitution or equivalent, that laws - any law, has to respect. And in the particular Finnish case, as pointed already, proposals are voted for in the parliament. But the things that you mention can as easily happen with a representative system.
If you are right about people. remember representatives are people too, therefore as stupid and evil as any other, possibly more.
Anyway, I think you're wrong. I don't see how direct democracy works any worse than representative democracy.

Yeah really. Nazi camps had all that too. Even swimming pools. They were also "high security prisons". It's not the prison that matters, is your policy for putting people there.

If by oil, religion, race, and freedom you mean natural resources, then yeah. If by small, punk regimes with crazy men at the helm, you mean non-nuclear countries, then yes too.
I guess the next logical step in your reasoning is "Bomb Iran", eh?

I guess what people are trying to say is that, although what you say probably applies in theory and even most times, these agencies have no problems in skipping that particular step involving the judge if they (or a particular someone in there with enough power) really, really want to know something about a US citizen. Cops do it frequently with wiretaps, so I'd assume big bureaucratic agencies that operate in secrecy have little difficulty in pulling that out. The lack of public interest and things like the PATRIOT act only help to that surely. I think most of times they don't really expect anyone to come looking anyway.

Out of those 13 headlines in your post, 7 are about people that pleaded guilty. Somehow, I find that odd. 5 of them are about providing or attempting to provide, or conspiring to provide,material support to "terrorists" or terrorist orgs like al Shabaab (interestingly, Al Qaeda seems to be démodé these days, Al Shabaab is the new rage). Now my question is, the FBI seems quite successful in arresting people providing material support to terrorists but, where are the terrorists themselves?

Furthermore, Gitmo is a concentration camp. So your comparison actually makes sense. In fact, not only it is a concentration camp, it's one on foreign ground too, a fact which allows evading US laws. Is it one of the worst things ever? People are detained there without accusation or trial for years on end, so, yes.

Doesn't that mean that you end up never actually voting for anyone?

In other words, can we really expect to find the ideal candidate for every election, as in, the one that represents every (or even most) of one's opinions on all issues?

I think you might want to say

instead.
Being rich is pretty much a relative thing. I'm sure you're rich compared to somebody on this planet. That doesn't make you bad or a psychopath, but it does empower your evilness and psychopathy. But then so does having a public mandate or a large public willing to listen to you. But you most likely know this already.
It's unfair and simplistic to put the blame on the rich or the politicians only. People often claim for democracy and freedom, but the when they get it they proceed to elect the shadiest people to office. When under a dictatorship it's easy to find responsibilities: they're all concentrated on the dictator. In a democracy, the responsibility is on the elector, like it or not. So when we start criticising corrupt politicians, we should finish by criticising the corrupt people that vote for them.

The only thing I believe in is science. But saying that religion corrupts minds does seem to me a vicious or vitriolic attack, as I doubt any causation or correlation between 'religious minds' and 'corrupt minds' has ever been established.

How do you know which species have the capacity for memes? What kind of memes? How can a meme occur in the first place if not spontaneously?

No it wouldn't. It would only require that phenotypes displaying it are less favoured by natural selection than ones displaying heterosexuality. No one is passing moral judgement here.

True. But we're still lacking a scientific explanation for multiple sexual orientations. All I'm saying is that is seems more likely to me that it has memetic (or psychological or nurture), rather than a genetic (or nature origin). That doesn't mean people can at any point choose their sexual orientation just like they can't choose many of their personality traits. I am also suggesting that religious people might have trouble choosing not to be religious without external help. The main difference would be that, if I'm right, the meme for sexual orientation acts on much more primitive and deep way in our brain than the religious one, hence in a way rather unaccessible to our conscious experience. That would also mean the the meme could act on most large animals with which we share the most primitive part of the brain.

I couldn't care less what the sexual orientation of people is (unless I'm sexually interested in them). But I would definitely like to see a scientific explanation for the undeniable fact that multiple sexual orientations do exist.

Sexuality is natural yes. That is pretty much a tautology. But who says sexual orientation is not a meme? A powerful and primitive one yes, but a meme still? It surely makes more sense to me than to think it's some sort of genetic feature, in which case homosexuality would be a defect that managed to elude hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection, or that is so common a mutation as to suddenly re-appear with so much frequency (if this is the case, then it should be quite easy to pinpoint genetically).

The fact that religion (or some sort of mystical worldview) has sprouted pretty much in every human culture independently suggests that there probably is some natural propensity to be religious. In fact, it takes education and training in critical thinking to effectively shut down the religious meme.

So, you could reasonably argue that both phenomena are not that different. That both are memes. And both have, like it or not, an influence and power that can profoundly affect the basic core of human society. And if sexual orientation is not a choice, the fact that a supernatural worldview might creep in your head might not be a choice either. So maybe you should be more careful with the vitriolic attacks on religion, as you might be discriminating people for something that they can't control (without some help at least).

But hey, I know these days it's so PC to defend the right to sexual orientation and it's so fashionable to attack religion... Not that I'm claiming you do it for these reasons. But I find it curious how we so suddenly jumped from homosexuality being a taboo sickness to being an unattackable right (while at the same time not being a choice). It seems to me no one is trying to understand it anymore, which, in turn, means it can suddenly become a taboo disease again, should the winds change direction again. But oh well, this is just me ranting...

My point is, we actually don't know where sexual orientation comes from (and apparently no one cares) and we also don't know where religion comes from (or why it's so hard to make it go away), therefore, viciously attacking one while piously defending the other (seems to me it) is probably a bad idea.

Yes. I knew you would choose that one. Let us consider, however, how it all played out according to the article I posted:

From the Wikipedia article on manslaughter:

Back to Hurndall:

So, while your compatriot was charged and convicted with manslaughter, what really happened was murder. Unless an award-winning marksman shot a head on top of a bright orange jacket near some children without intention to kill or unaware he was creating a deadly situation.
And yes, I I take time to carefully write most of my posts because that's how I think everybody should do. But I take extra care when replying to people like you, so that everybody here sees who the delusional person is.

Wanna choose another 'fact' I'm lying about?