What I’ve learned from the attack:
Everybody’s using as a platform for their favorite soapbox.
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My favorite soapbox is criticizing the, “THIS REPRESENTS SOMETHING LARGER THAN A SINGLE EVENT!” mentality that’s impossible to escape.
[/soapbox]
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Yes. We each stand on a soapbox in turn. Nothing wrong with a soapbox but a soapbox is a soapbox.
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Pretty much except the audience is on stage too. Gathering likes = extra shoves on stage against those on opposite side.
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I’ve been online since 1989 and these are the same as Usenet debates – as the meme goes … war… never changes. 😛 I enjoy it.
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https://vine.co/v/idrYnPx3gEz random meme reference
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Is it 300 million willing to die? In what fashion? If you refer to terrorist attacks, it’s usually 1-2 guys. Maybe 12. No more than that. As far as ground fighting? That’s war. Plain old boring war and the USA is sending people over to do the same.
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Big numbers impress some people, especially if a % is after it. 98.5% of photons agree with me. [suddenly gets surrounded by infinite darkness]… shit…
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Sharia law has a great economic system but its human rights abuses suck. Most of Sharia law is indistinguishable from English Common Law and the US modified English common law.
But the parts that they differ? Yeah, they’re pretty huge.
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There’s times in the USA where it was Treason to speak against the USA or speak in support of another system, punishable by death.
It’s not identical, no. But we’ve been there in our own way too.
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Point is, and brings up a valid example, every culture has a checkered past. This doesn’t mean we have to forgive Sharia Law or accept it: It needs to be challenged and fought. The UN tries to do it in their own fashion, although they’re limited in what they can do to enforce things.
There are also human rights abuses in the USA that need to be fought and they are. It’s not equivalent but for example, the way we treat illegals who are caught and detained breaks a number of human rights codes at present and has for a long time. The way we treat homeless, the mentally ill… we’re far from a perfect country and we need a lot of work too…
That being said… yes, for the good of humanity, human rights abuses need to be fought. But if you’re looking for pure good guys, superheroes of golden character, you’re not gonna find it anywhere. We just limp along the best we can and try to do better.
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Good night. as far as that guy goes, I go with the “closet gay with overbearing father wanting suicide by cop for a martyr’s death” all by himself storyline for now.
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I’m pretty sure I know my subroutines although I rarely get caught on them. Self-righteous and smug and “too good for this group” almost nails me but not quite.
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Humans are rarely self-aware AI.
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Yesterday, someone said that this is a race issue, although was arguing for the alt.right point. I never got anything further though: I wanted to hear more ’cause it sounded like an interesting angle… but when I said that ppl from Arabic counties don’t see race in the same breakdown… he left, which was disappointing. It sounded like an interesting angle.
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His dad… ugh. He’s like one of those people that’s well spoken and intelligent up to a point… and then you realize he’s nuts.
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I’d trust Ben Carson to do my brain surgery but not for a history lesson that’s for sure. Still, I like how he blasted the media back in Feb. That was good to hear the soft spoken dude speak out a bit.
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It’s the ones that think they’re rational when they follow a script. all I have to say is “I’m agnostic” and I get to watch the 20 questions. So many times going through that through the years… so predictable. This touches on s point about scripts. Once you understand someone’s script it gets easy to deal with them and almost fun.
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I’m neither Fem nor SJW but Hitchens, Dawkins and don’t get me on Sam Harris… they just … ugh. Different reasons tho’. idk why Feminists/SJW don’t like them except that they’re old babbling white men. .. well Sam’s younger but he’s like one of those dudes that almost makes sense ’til you realize he’s off in la-la land.
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If you don’t get the urge to tell me why I’m really atheist using a four-square chart when I say I’m agnostic, then I respect the respect you have for them.
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It’s not them per se, it’s the religion (broad term religion, not narrow term) that came out of them. They don’t always come together in a package: I spent a year studying New Atheist culture by joining the Philosophy group that spawned this group, along with others about 16 months ago. I’m out of them now – my informal study is done.
The alt.right has some of my interest now, especially in how they’ve successfully adopted PC style argumentation I learned in 1990/91, showing the strange success of it over the past 25 years…
Somewhere in my notes I have specific reasons for each but summarizing in general:
I’m somewhat of a Carl Sagan agnostic. Not entirely but close enough for generalization purposes.
The type of atheist I approve of is the Douglas Adams atheist.
Does this help a little?
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To me, they’re Bishops of a novel religious movement. It didn’t exist in the early 1990s: I remember Douglas Adams on alt . ascii-art and talked with him a few times while he was alive. Sometimes he’d get into friendly debates in that and other groups but his tone was mostly absurdist in nature.
And… I think that’s the key: the lack of sense of humor among the New Atheists.
They can’t laugh at themselves. It’s positively puritanical of a religion.
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In short, one could say, it’s the SJW style of New Atheism that makes me roll my eyes. Atheism I have no beef with. But when I see New Atheism I see 3rd wave feminism except it’s about something else.
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He was just another dude on Usenet, although I fangirled a little bit at first of course ’cause I saw the BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide thing as a kid in the 80s and fell in love with his absurdism.
I think it’s dealing with the 20 questions after saying “I’m agnostic” that annoyed me. I can answer them: I answer the standard questions differently each time to keep it interesting but it got boring after a while.
It’s the AI of it. The script. The lack of self-awareness of their own programming. My goal was always to “find the human inside” and I’d stick with it until I got some human normal response from them. They usually friend requested me after that because I was willing to go the extra mile. Consequently, my FB feed is FULL of atheist stuff, but whatever. They’re human now.
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I don’t attack muslims for Florida because the dude was a Floridian who went to Florida schools, raised by a dad who is a prick who sits comfortably in the USA blabbing about how great the Taliban is, abused his wives because he was gay and he was rejected by the Latino gay men in the Latino gay men’s bar he shot up.
That’s the story line that works best for me. His “I’m ISIS yo” doesn’t impress me.
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Well, hearsay is hearsay but a lot of news is rumor and hearsay. That being said, I snagged this screenshot last night when some news reporter was talking about some stuff he came across and was going to report on. How true is it? I dunno. But honestly, as a narrative, it is far more logical.
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The guy was an American through and through. tbh I’d blame having to go through the Florida public school system over his dad. Brutal. A number of my nieces + nes went through it. [I’ve been in Florida for the past 14 years]. Plus working as a gate-man at a community can definitely fill your head with dreams of noble glorious deaths. Millenial. 29 years old. No future in sight. Death by cop. Seems logical.
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I’m just trying to see the story for what it is. Media loves blowing stuff out of proportion and any excuse to drop a few more bombs and we’re on top of it. America loves bombing shit. We’re good at it.
I grew up in NJ. Jewish ppl never bothered me any.
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I grew up in a 1 sq mile town, 1/2 Irish, 1/2 Italian. I didn’t really fit in either group. Italians were mafia, Irish were cops. But surrounding towns had their own neighborhoods of different nationalities and ethnicities. So, I never grew up or lived in a place where there were “people like me”. I expect diversity. Sameness seems strange to me.
as far as the secretly gay thing: it just seems logical. If the guy was Christian or Buddhist or Atheist, or Jamaican, he’d still be a nutjob with a nutjob dad who did a horrible thing.
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Eh, it’s possible. But considering the bar specifically was a gay latino bar does make a bit of a difference. Gay latinos are a self-separated group within the gay community and are very exclusive. He’d be an outsider, even though to you or me he’d LOOK like he’d fit in.
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Might not have been exclusively Latino on paper but like a lot of gathering places, it’s often taken over by one particular group or another.
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Well, if the Irish stop going, somebody’s gotta pay the rent. We had that happen in the town I grew up in too. It was traditional Irish pub but then the Irish got old and died out, so it became a lesbian bar. There was a need, they had the $, it pays the rent.
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Oh, but new ones arise. For just as much diversity happens in some segments, there’s always a backlash of people gathering with “their own” that counteracts it.
There’s still Irish pride that goes on and stuff if that’s your thing. You just gotta find it.
A friend of mine whose family is Irish to the core, joined a Fife & Drum brigade as a teenager and now in her late 30s, still doing it, living up in Rochester NY, doing historical re-enactments of classic American battles, and in her spare time, when she’s not a security analyst for a high tech company (wicked smart woman), she sews traditional irish, scottish and american colonial clothing.
So, if it matters to you, you just gotta make it happen.
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I don’t think I’ve ever lived where I was represented by the people around me. I’ve got a lot of English, some Irish and German and Scotch, and probably more than a little Welsh ’cause they seem to all look like me… but personality-wise, I’m like a Canadian. Never been there but as you could imagine, with an apparently Canadian personality, ‘fitting in’ here in the USA never really happens.
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Tried a few times. Explored German and Irish roots in the past. …….. (last name, long story) and ended up joining the Russian Orthodox Church and almost became a monk in my 20s. … but still learned a lot, taught myself a little Russian in the meantime.
Yet, I’ve always been an Anglophile since I was a kid. Always connected to Doctor Who, British comedy and stuff – my mother still watches English mysteries faithfully.
Yet, I don’t care for English food. India, now India I could probably do.
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I was destined for diversity anyway. Grandmother believed in ancient aliens and was a fan of Edgar Cayce. She got me into Doctor Who when I was 8… and her New Age-y interests got *me* interested in that stuff for a few years. Mother fed us yogurt as kids.. she read Mother Earth News… yet she worked in law enforcement… grandmother was obsessed by engineers… meh, I could go on with weird life story but suffice to say that if I was raised in an artsy community I’d probably be Dragoneye Spoonkid but they never went that deep into it.
Thankfully, raised in NJ gave me NJ sarcasm. I try to keep it at bay though.
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I came from a bluecollar, beer drinking hang-out-at-the-bar, play dungeons and dragons town. Spent a few years hanging out at bars with my mom’s friend’s son (Scottish-American, loved drinking), but it wasn’t my thing.
Now I run a family business to help my bro and his family out mostly. I had a good systems analyst job, saved up $, got a mortgage, now all 12 of us live together in a house by the florida everglades.
One day I asked my brother what he wanted to do with his life. He was dong landscaping at the time. He was quiet. Then said, “work with animals”. [he’s a deer hunter]
So, now I run an animal trapping business. I do the business side he does the trapping side. 13 yrs. Totally unexpected life direction but I was never a planner anyway.
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My mother was married to an Egyptian Muslim for a few years when I was a kid, so it’s hard for me to have bias against Muslims. She still has his last name. Gets searched at airports.
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