Nothing. It's not even theoretically possible.

Did you include the word 'theoretically' to sound more nuanced than you're actually being? If something is theoretically possible, then it's possible. . . I mean, come on, a theory is literally a representation of reality.

Just out of question, what's your opinion of people who are pretty much ccentral?

Being a centrist just seems lazy to me really; moderation for moderation's sake.

I'm a bit old-fashioned in the sense that I think the man ought to be the breadwinner when kids come along. Sometimes, however, that isn't possible and there's nothing wrong with being a househusband in principle.

You know your own life better than I do.

Quote from: Verbatim on February 02, 2015, 02:29:34 PM

>cracked

this is the serious board

So Cracked articles can't discuss serious subject matter alongside adding entertainment value?

>cracked
>serious
>entertaining

Did you quantum leap here from another fucking universe?

LOL

I preferred you with the dinosaur/bionicles avatar.

don't worry; i actually won't do that

Gotta be honest, that semi-colon is pissing me the fuck off.

That's a shame, he was incredibly talented.

Just trying to point out that we're criticizing a particular group by referencing the actions of separate groups, in which this would otherwise probably be a solid thread.

Um. . . Where?

We're criticising both the insurgency, specifically its snipers, and militant Islam in general. I'm not exactly seeing the conflation here with any other group.

So not the Iraqis that Chris Kyle was killing, specifically.

It looks like the entire point of the thread has escaped you. Nobody's saying Chris Kyle wasn't a cunt.

Are you changing the script to translate over well to video?

It's not a script, per se, more just notes. I won't be reading it verbatim, or like a robot.

That is true, but isn't violent legislation, and actions from people and governments in Europe going to escalate an already boiling situation, especially with the fundamentalists?

That's essentially a milder way of asking whether or not printing Mohammed's picture will get you killed. Potentially, depending on the specifics, but it doesn't mean you should capitulate to these sorts of theocratic sociopathy.

Wait, what's the difference between Islamism and Islam in general, or are they the same?

Islamism is essentially a sort of militant/expansionist political Islam.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on February 02, 2015, 11:26:31 AM

Quote from: HurtfulTurkey on February 02, 2015, 11:20:10 AM

Quote

In the end, the housing bubble and the financial crisis were not causes in themselves of the Recession.

I still can't bring myself to agree with this. You simply can't look at such a drastic credit bubble and say it had nothing to do with the subsequent recession.

It's certainly obvious that the financial crisis worsened the Recession (much like a vicious cycle) by further depressing aggregate demand, but it's nothing monetary policy couldn't have handled and, like the AEI paper states, intermediation between financial institutions had returned to regular levels shortly after the crash.

Not to mention, in both the instances of the Depression and the Recession, the economy was showing clear signs of weakness prior to the ensuing banking crises. If you can't accept that a credit crisis that big couldn't have caused the Recession, I'd be interested to know how you explain the crash of 1987 and the success of monetary policy immediately following.

It's not about assigning a sole cause; recessions can happen independently of a credit bubble, but to say it's irrelevant just doesn't make sense. I think metaphors are condescending and I try to avoid using them, but this is like stabbing a guy three times and saying his bleeding to death was contingent only on the first stab.

I'm not denying the role the financial crisis had in the Recession--after the Recession began, I really should stress--I'm saying the primary cause was tight monetary policy, which has historically proven itself to be a great way of completely fucking up your economy. The financial system was thrown into turmoil because of these underlying macroeconomic weaknesses in the economy. Again, the most effective reference point is with the Great Depression--the strongest year of growth was right after the beginning of currency devaluation and during the worst year for the financial system. During the Recession, lending had pretty much restored itself by 2008 and by late 2009 (according to the economists who wrote the book House of Debt, which also criticised the lending-driven narrative) the financial system was fully repaired, and yet growth has been disastrous since and, when comparing different economies, suitably correspondent to accommodative monetary policy.

By Serkan Engin, a Turkish poet and atheist.

I am an atheist author and poet, who had lived as a Sunni Muslim for 23 years from birth, and I am still living in a Muslim country, Turkey. Also, my parents and all of my relatives are still Muslim. So, my critics about Islam can be easily consider this an inside view.

I know that the title of this essay seems assertive, but I will explain the rightness of this title step-by-step in this essay.

First of all, you have to learn about Islam that if you are an “outsider”, a non-Muslim, for example, a Christian, an atheist, a Buddhist, a Jew or whatever else, all Muslims have the “right” of killing and raping you, grabbing all your properties, your country, land, money and anything else. They take this “right” from the book of their belief, the Quran. In other words, they take this “right” from their belief’s core, the theology of Islam.

Here are some examples of this in verses from Quran.

This verse of Quran is about “all non-Muslims”, all “heretics”! — Christians, Buddhists, atheists, Jews, etc. — describing them “who wage war against Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad)”

Surat Al-Ma’idah (5.33)

http://quran.com/5/33

“Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment.”

And this verse of the Quran is about the order to kill the humans who left Islam, the apostates:

Surat An-Nisa’ (4.89)

http://quran.com/4/89

“They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper.”

Look at the current situation in Syria. How can Islamist terrorists slaughter Alawite people or rape Christian women so easily? Because they take this “right” from their belief and they believe that they will go to the heaven because of these vandalistic actions against “outsiders”, who are out of Islam, who don’t believe the same religious tenets — in other words, those who are the “heretics” according to their belief. Some Muslims say, “But they are not the real Muslims.” That is a big lie; that is the exact form of real Islam, because these vandalistic actions are in accord with the orders of Quran.

You have heard many times that “Islam is a tolerant religion”. That is the biggest lie that you can hear all over the World, and this lie is used as a mask to hide the terrible face of Islam. There is NO difference between Islam and Islamism. This is the main error that the modern world make about Islam. There are not different forms as Islam and Islamism, they are the same thing, and they have the same content. This separation is just only an illusion, and it is used by Muslims to hide the brutal, hateful, oppressive,murderous, genocidal face of Islam.

Islamic theology is based on the verses of the Quran and Hadith. Hadiths are the words and actions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and all Muslims must follow these words and actions in addition to the orders of Quran. For example, you have to defecate as Muhammad did, and you have to clean yourself as he did, or you can rape and enslave a “heretic” woman in a war as a sex slave as Muhammad did, or you can torture your enemy in a war to learn the place of his hidden money, as Muhammad did.

You “must” cut the hand of a thief as Muhammad did, not give him any prison sentence as do the modern laws.

You must stone a woman to death as Muhammad did, because she had sex outside of the rules of Islam (but you must only whip her partner a hundred times). If you are a Muslim, you can never set them free while considering that their sexual actions are about their own personal relations and freedom, in accord with modern laws. You must definitely apply the punishments of Muhammad such as stoning the woman to the death and whipping her partner a hundred times if you want to be a good Muslim.

You must kill the man who left the belief of Islam, as Muhammad did. You can’t say “This is his own choice and he has the freedom of thought and belief”, because it is an order of the Quran that you “must” kill the persons who were Muslim before and then left the Islamic religion.

You must kill all homosexuals according to the orders of Islam. No Muslims can say according to Islam that their sexual orientation is their own natural right, in accord with the human rights norms of our age.

You have the “right” to marry a little girl at 9 years old, as Muhammad did. In other words, you can rape a little child legally in Islam and make her a sex slave, and also a domestic slave till the end of her life.

You can lie alongside of your dead wife for 6 hours, as Muhammad did. In other words, you can rape the dead body of your wife for 6 hours after her death.

Here is Islam…Here is the “tolerant religion”…Here is the right way to the heaven…Here are the orders of Allah…Here are the actions of Muhammad…

You can easily see how civilized the Muslim countries of the world are because of Islam, such as Afghanistan, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, Sudan and the others. You can see how much they have contributed to the history of philosophy, the history of art, and the history of science of the whole world. You can see how respectful they are to human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, the freedom of expression and thought, the freedom of the press, the freedom of belief, etc.

The first genocide wave of 20th century, the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide and the Pontic Greek Genocide, was perpetrated by Turkish and Kurdish people of the Ottoman Empire and the new Turkish Republic, getting motivation from the “rights” that they had because of Islam: the “rights” of killing and raping the non-Muslims, enslaving their women and little girls as sex slaves and also domestic slaves, and grabbing their money, houses and lands. However, “The Committee of Union and Progress” (CUP) (Turkish: İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) was based on Turkish nationalism; they used Turkish and Kurdish people easily for these genocides because of the Islamic religion’s content about non-Muslims. All the Turkish and Kurdish Muslims believed that they would go to the heaven if they killed more non-Muslims, as do today’s Islamist terrorists.

The owners of the second genocide wave of 20th century were Nazis, as you know. They took the genocides of the Turks as a sample. It is know that Adolf Hitler said to his military commanders, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?,” while they were talking about the reaction of the world about the genocides that they were planning to perpetrate.

Nazism was considered a legal and respectable ideology at the beginning of the 1930s, and then the world saw how dangerous Nazism was. Millions of people died because of Nazism, and today it is illegal to support Nazism in any civilized country. You can never make propaganda about Nazism legally. Today, Nazism is not considered as a genuine thought alternative, and it is not included in the freedom of thought and expression.

As I have detailed above, Islam is against the human rights norms of our age, and it has more dangerous content than Nazism. Islam is not a belief alternative, it is just a crime against humanity, and any crime shouldn’t have freedom in our modern world. So, Islam must be declared illegal all over the world, as is Nazism, because of its vandal content and commands that are against human rights. All actions about Islam must be forbidden and the propagandists of Islam must be judged because of instigating to the crimes of murder, rape, grab and crimes against humanity. Otherwise, the world will meet with a big tragedy when the Islamists will get more power, as the world suffered because of Nazism.

I can't bring myself to say Islam is worse than, or even as bad as, Nazism and I can't say I agree with the final paragraph there, but it's certainly both important and interesting to consider just what he is saying.

I'm not afraid of looking jingoistic at all--we're in a state of war, and a very serious one at that.