Quote from: Benoist;427732In France it was in part to eradicate regionalism, regional languages, make all citizens educated and literate at the same source, to both increase the baseline education of the population, and ensure that all children are raised with the same Republican values.

So it's absolutely not *just* out of the goodness of their hearts they initiated those public education programs.

Ditto the US, largely.  'Republican' meaning 'the Republic' over here as well as over there.  Primarily to get a very basic education and literacy for the factory workers, and nothing else.
EDIT:  France and Europe in general are probably still very eager to teach civics in primary and secondary classes, but from what I can gather over here, civics has been quietly and almost completely excised from the curriculum.  In other words, we don't get much instruction about 'the Republic' anymore.

Quote from: John Morrow;427462Perhaps both Bruce Baugh's reaction to Spirit of the Century and Deadlands are two extreme cases, but they are the opposite extremes, and that's what's relevant.  In other words, one the one hand, you complain about dwelling on the sins of the past while, on the other, you also complain about hand-waving those sins away.  So how exactly should a setting handle these issues?  What's "just right", Goldilocks?

There are many games that get it just right, or just about just right, when it comes to history.  Most of the GURPS historical sourcebooks. Call of Cthulhu. Pendragon. Aces & Eights.  Space: 1889.  
Just present history honestly, as it was. It should neither be the job of the game designer to either forcibly whitewash or forcibly demand that these issues be addressed.

QuoteYou just want to downplay that you, like Mr. Baugh, are offended at and insulted by the cheap and easy way a serious historical racial problem is being downplayed in a role-playing product.

He may be voicing a superficially similar complaint, but his motives and his "solution" are dramatically different from my own.

RPGPundit

Quote from: John Morrow;427664And plenty of religious people are just as convinced that they are right and you are wrong.  But, I know, you just know you are right because everyone you know thinks just like you do, right?

Don't want to get in the middle of this, but, John there's a difference between talking about existence of God or matters of faith in a religion and whether the Earth is 5,000 or 5,000,000,000 years old.

We have a sitting US congressman who thinks that there won't be major worldwide flooding because God promised Noah in the bible that He wouldn't send another flood.  Who is this jackass?  John Shimkus.

Quote from: Jackass's WebsiteJohn M. Shimkus is serving his 14th year in Congress and represents the 19th District of Illinois.

John serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  He serves on the Subcommittees on Communications, Technology, and the Internet; Energy and Environment; and Health. He is the highest ranking Republican on the Health subcommittee.

Luckily this shithead hasn't gotten himself a committee chair yet.

Intelligent design, young earth, all kinds of Fundamentalist Protestant Christian beliefs are simply and objectively wrong.

Quote from: ggroy;427730What was the original intention of the public school system, besides a glorified free babysitting service?

To train the children of illiterate farmers to be good factory workers.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;427791To train the children of illiterate farmers to be good factory workers.

I can see this being the case for elementary school.

I remember quite a few older family members who never went to high school.  (The ones still alive would be in their eighties or nineties today).  Back then, high school was completely optional and actually required a written entrance exam for admissions in some jurisdictions.  Kids who didn't bother with high school, usually left after the seventh or eight grade and just went straight to the factories in town or they went to work for the family business.

John, the church thought Mendel and others were on their way to scientifically proving the bible.  If the Vatican had known Mendelian genetics would wind up confirming Darwin's big idea, he would have been as popular as Galileo and Copernicus.  Doing something based in reality wasn't the church's big hope for him.

The idea that everyone was convinced of Iraq's WMD is a fine example of revisionist history gaining popularity in a short time.  Hans Blix was given full access by Saddam and found nothing - a result so inconvenient that the Bush administration attempted to interfere with his investigation on every level.  Here in Australia we had Andrew Wilkie.  In Britain, David Kelly was hounded to suicide for publicly maintaining that Iraq had nothing.  There were street protests and masses of media reportage on this topic, and forgetting it is an achievement in itself.

Reality is liberal once again, and that's before we even start asking why the right believes Saudis training Saudis in Saudi to fly planes into American skyscrapers is a clear case for invading...Iraq.

As predicted, you leapt on communism with gusto, and it's easy to understand why.  Two millennia of conservatives being greatly mistaken not only in matters of ideology but fiercely resisting basic facts of the universe is a lot easier to ignore when there's a huge leftist error of judgement within the last century.

It's an interesting comparison to make, though, because it demonstrates the superior ability of liberals to get to grips with reality even after some deviation.  You don't find many enthusiastic western communists any more, and certainly not in positions of influence, but the right can't wait to delete basic theories from science textbooks and hand over the nuclear codes to people who call foreign leaders in the dead of night to say that Gog and Magog have arisen in the middle east and must be fought by the forces of light.

No shit.  In the 21st century the American right elected to the most powerful office in the world a man who believes his primary role is to hasten a supernatural apocalypse.  And now more of the same are lining up for a shot at the title.  Can you identify any popular western leftist who comes even close to such disdain for reality?  

And, of course, prior to the horrific century of left-sponsored communism, there were 2000 years of Christian pogroms, Inquisitions and crusades.  Compared to cultural conservatives, leftists are amateurs at this mass-killing business.  Even in the 20th century, liberal support for communism was based on a belief that it would improve the lives of human beings here and now, for evidence-based reasons.  The religious right, meanwhile, has been killing people for century after century because they disagreed with the specifics of middle eastern folktales, or placed greater value on data and observation than the edicts of a pope.  Even when the left fucks up, it's more grounded in reality than the right.

Now please don't reply with comparative body counts.  It would be embarrassing to have to explain why a Stalin can kill more people in a population of millions with machinery and firearms than Catholic crusaders could with swords and fire in a sparse population.

Reality has a liberal bias.  Now if you'll excuse me I have to go and make my way in a society that's been reduced to a smoking ruin by women's suffrage and the insidious plague of black jazz musicians.  Hopefully I won't be struck by lightning today for being a blasphemer.  These are, after all, unarguable facts that cannot be ignored.

To be fair... I've never attended any sort of class/school that didn't involve some amount of indoctrination into an orthodoxy of some sort. Just some were more honest about it than others...

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806Reality has a liberal bias.  Now if you'll excuse me I have to go and make my way in a society that's been reduced to a smoking ruin by women's suffrage and the insidious plague of black jazz musicians.  Hopefully I won't be struck by lightning today for being a blasphemer.  These are, after all, unarguable facts that cannot be ignored.

Dead on, brother.  I spent the last few hours dodging a saxophone and clarinet wielding Afro-Cuban fusion gang intent on an improv jam session.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756Really?  That is all you have?  Sad.

One can only say so much to a frothing mad dog's rants.  It's always hilarious to watch someone rant about "hatred and intolerance" while displaying "hatred and intolerance" aplenty.  Projection isn't just for movie theaters.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756This is an absolute right-wing propaganda lie.  The only people who have ever used the term 'political correctness' outside of the PoliSci classroom are conservatives who want to defend their casual racism.

Read this 1985 Usenet thread on net.women from when the term first started being used as a put-down.  Note the reply by Tony Wuersch, where he writes, "Around Berkeley, perhaps this didn't happen, since there are still many 'politically correct' buttons around.  The term hasn't become pejorative there as it has in New York City."  Note that both he and the original poster are talking about people wearing politically correct buttons to identify themselves as "politically correct".  Note also that he talks about the term becoming pejorative, because it originally wasn't.  

If you search the Usenet archives from the early 1980s, you'll certainly find people using the term pejoratively and in quotes, but you'll also find people using it seriously.  For example, Robert DeBenedictis wrote to net.motss in 1983 (motss = members of the same sex, that is, the gay discussion group) "2. Coming Out, the Pros and Cons: is it politically correct (or even polite) to try to convince closeted people to come out.  How entitled are they to remain in the Closet? 3. Politicaly Correct: What does 'PC' mean?  Is it like etiquette? What are the advantages of being PC?  Am I 'self-depracating' if I am not PC?"  It's pretty clear that Mr. DeBenedictis was not picking the term up from Bible-thumping bigots as a pejorative.

Or you could just look at the Wikipedia entry for Political correctness and find:

"By 1970, New Left proponents had adopted the term political correctness. In the essay The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara says: ". . . a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist too". The New Left later re-appropriated the term political correctness as satirical self-criticism; per Debra Shultz: "Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives . . . used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts". Hence, it is a popular English usage in the underground comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, while ideologically sound, an alternative term, followed a like lexical path, appearing in Bart Dickon's satirical comic strips. Moreover, Ellen Willis says: " . . . in the early '80s, when feminists used the term political correctness, it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality' "."

I mean, if you weren't so reality challenged, you'd realize that the term "politically correct" just oozes academic Marxism.  Conservatives don't talk like that... except when they are mocking liberals.  Of course people on the left were even mocking each other with that term before conservatives started doing it.  The term is so effective as a pejorative because what it mocks is so ridiculous that even the people who are ideologically on the same side often realize it.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756Whoa, there, Chester!  Isn't that the very cornerstone of conservative ideology?

It depends on how "limited" you want your "limited government" to be.  Among conservatives, that can range from the nutty belief that the government shouldn't do anything but protect property and keeping people from abusing each other to people who are perfectly fine with the government providing public education, Social Security, and so on, but the latter type are closer to the middle and thus don't make convenient straw men for angry leftist tirades, do they?  Limited government does not mean no government.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756Why isn't it?

Because everyone who says that they believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster is lying.  Nobody actually believes it's real.  But I'm sure you already know that.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756All religion is myth, even yours.  I will assume from your answer, however, that teaching Hinduism in place of Christianity would get you down to the school board meeting as fast as physics would allow.

The problem is that you are assuming and not reading.  

No, what I was saying is that a school has no more business telling a Hindu child that their religion is a myth or treating it like a cultural curiosity than they have telling a Christian child that their religion is a myth and treating it as a cultural curiosity.  Or a Jewish kid.  Or a Muslim kid.  When I learned about Islam in Middle School, we were basically told that Mohammed was a charlatan and I could understand Muslim parents being unhappy about their kid being taught that in school and don't think that's appropriate, regardless of whether I think it's true or not.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756"Some of my best friends are non-Christian!!"

There is only so much one can do to prove a negative, but that's the beauty of calling someone a bigot, it's it?  My point is that I'm pretty well versed in what other religions believe and I'm not concerned about getting the cooties from non-Christians.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756So, you don't care about education particularly, you are just aggrieved from being on the losing side of the debate (and history!) for so long.  Gotcha.

Keep dancing with your straw man, Dorothy.  It sounds like you've already entered the final act of the movie Brazil.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756John, you don't even have a concept of the middle.  You weasel around everything and demand everyone meet you on your terms.

Nonsense.  I was asked for a middle ground on teaching evolution in schools.  You will notice that I didn't say "stop teaching evolution".  You will notice that I didn't say "teach creationism" or "teach the objections people have to creationism".  I said, "teach evolution as the mainstream scientific explanation for things and acknowledge that it's a theory that does not necessarily invalidate the religious beliefs of students and their parents."  I added, "In other words, 'This is what we are teaching you and you will be tested on, but you don't have to believe it.'"  So how, exactly, is that demanding that everyone meet me on my terms, Skippy?  

And if you are going to rant like a rabid Air America host every time you reply to me, I'm going to respond accordingly.  

Quote from: StormBringer;427756For example, if I thought for a second that public schools would offer a course in theology that encompassed all faiths and philosophies, and a general study of religion and philosophy, I would be in the front lines fighting for that.  But you know very well that 'religion' means 'my version of Christianity', and you have no conceptual framework to understand why teaching any particular religion in a public school is a bad thing.

You don't oppose the teaching of religion in public schools because of any "conceptual framework" or "understanding".  You oppose it because, as you just said, "[a]ll religion is myth."  So stop the elitist posturing.  It all boils down to you having a chip on your shoulder about religion, that comes through loud and clear in all of your comments about religion and religious people.  

If you really had a case, you'd explain it rather than telling me what I don't understand.  Here's a free hint for the reality challenged: If your arguments only make sense to you, it's generally not because you are the only special person smart enough to understand it.  

Quote from: StormBringer;427756That is a really big non-sequitur.

How, exactly, is talking about the hardships that people endured, the work that they did, and the risks that the took to counter your skepticism that people actually do get wealthy through hard work a non-sequitur?

Quote from: StormBringer;427756EDIT:  Almost forgot, my grandparents were around at the beginning of WWI, around 1915-6, and died 70-odd years later.  Your assumptions that the only person in the world with any personal experience in anything is named 'John Morrow' is getting really fucking old.

And what did your grandparents tell you about their life during the Great Depression?  Because apparently you've never met anyone who got wealthy through hard work.  I was assuming ignorance.  I mean, I could just assume you are a self-hating rich kid or that your family are a bunch of losers who never succeeded, but that wouldn't be very nice of me or fair to your family, which I know nothing about.  So by all means, do fill in the details for me.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756Those people are 'comfortable', or perhaps 'well-off'.  They aren't 'wealthy', and they are no where near 'rich'.

And where, exactly, does "wealthy" or "rich" start, in our opinion?  Does Bill Gates count?  You don't think his 80 hour work-weeks and sleeping in a cot in his office count as "hard work"?  How about Steve Jobs?  Think he's a slacker?

Quote from: StormBringer;427756Among other jobs, I have worked for the government.  And I am fully aware of how the political machine works these days, I don't need the lecture.  I understand that the only way you can communicate is through hierarchical language, but that is part of why your world is crumbling around you.

Wow, the projection just keeps coming, and you actually don't even seem to realize you are doing it.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756Your tears of unhinged rage at the world you can't control anymore nourishes me.

Frustration makes for a nice dessert.

It always fascinates me when self-righteous leftists show their true colors and reveal what spiteful thugs they really are.  You don't disappoint.

Quote from: StormBringer;427756There is far more to  Christianity than the Catholic church, but that interferes with your  internal dialogue, and I am wholly uninterested in being the platform for  you to get your talking points out as quickly and as frequently as  possible.

Most of the examples I gave you involved government support of Catholic schools.  Being unable to square that with the idea that supposedly more enlightened non-American countries helping to fund religious schools, you tried to deal with the cognitive dissonance by claiming I was "arguing in favour of a much more Liberal Christianity right now".  No, I was talking about the Catholic church.  You can't even follow your own argument, can you?  

Quote from: StormBringer;427756As usual, your collision with the external world has put you over the edge, so I will leave you to your inconsolable rage with a reality that refuses to conform to your wishes.

What rage?  Dude, I'm finding this incredibly entertaining.  I don't think I could do any better if I created a sockpuppet to argue against.

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806Now please don't reply with comparative body counts.  It would be embarrassing to have to explain why a Stalin can kill more people in a population of millions with machinery and firearms than Catholic crusaders could with swords and fire in a sparse population.

QuoteThankfully, the Spanish Inquisition kept very good records and these are now being sifted through by historians. They paint a very different picture of sentencing patterns to traditional historians. Geoffrey Parker analyzed 49,000 trial records between 1540 and 1700, representing one third of the total, and found 776 executions took place. This suggests a total of about 2,000 in the period reviewed. Earlier records are less well preserved but do not support the picture of a bloodbath usually painted. Henry Kamen (p. 60) does not believe more than a thousand executions took place in the earlier period. However, he points out that the Inquisitors activities were heavily slanted towards Jewish and Moslem communities who would have suffered far more than most from their activities. Recent work, sponsored by the Catholic Church, also points to a significantly lower death toll. Professor Agostino Borromeo, a historian of Catholicism at the Sapienza University in Rome, writes that about 125,000 people were tried by church tribunals as suspected heretics in Spain. Of these, about 1,200 - 2,000 were actually executed, although more killings were performed by non-church tribunals.

That's talking about the Spanish Inquisition. Now, I really don't want to go there, and as a matter of fact, I will avoid answering any further in this thread, mostly because of the fucking ass-backwards left-right food fight going on that obliterates any possibility of constructive dialog, but I just wanted to tell you: if you seriously think what you are talking about is somehow a reflection of unbiased reality, do yourself a favor, and think again. Seriously. That'll do you some good.

Quote from: StormBringer;427826Dead on, brother.  I spent the last few hours dodging a saxophone and clarinet wielding Afro-Cuban fusion gang intent on an improv jam session.

You really gotta watch out for that kind of thing...

QuoteRecent work, sponsored by the Catholic Church, also points to a significantly lower death toll.

Just saying, not necessarily famous for policing their own... or owning up to past mistakes.

Quote from: John Morrow;427829Nonsense.  I was asked for a middle ground on teaching evolution in schools.  You will notice that I didn't say "stop teaching evolution".  You will notice that I didn't say "teach creationism" or "teach the objections people have to creationism".  I said, "teach evolution as the mainstream scientific explanation for things and acknowledge that it's a theory that does not necessarily invalidate the religious beliefs of students and their parents."  I added, "In other words, 'This is what we are teaching you and you will be tested on, but you don't have to believe it.'"  So how, exactly, is that demanding that everyone meet me on my terms, Skippy?

I'm about to teach evolution in January to my kids.  The above pretty much fits the standard response of liberal-biased California educators, and mostly fits the California standards for the topic.  While there are those who would teach science and evolution as inherently anti-religion (like Richard Dawkins), they are a rare fringe.  Within the U.S., the majority of Democrats and liberals are themselves religious - usually Christian.  

A few caveats on this:  I would never use the phrase "just a theory" - because there is nothing more solid in science than a well-established theory.  I would say that it is a theory that represents our best understanding as much as anything else in science.  I would say that students don't have to believe evolution as the absolute truth - just that they have to understand it and correctly answer test questions about it.  

However, the liberal side isn't going to budge anywhere past that.  I am willing to teach that science is not absolute truth - and indeed that is part of the California standards.  However, I'm not willing to put in any special disclaimer to suggest that evolution is any less solid than other parts of science.  I personally would be willing to mention Intelligent Design, but mainly by way of demonstrating that it is weaker.  However, in general the educational and liberal community is completely opposed to that.

Quote from: Simlasa;427839Just saying, not necessarily famous for policing their own... or owning up to past mistakes.

Wow, this thread has had one hell of a drift.

What the heck does the Catholic Church have to do with the Old West or alternate timelines and settings related to the American Civil War?


- Ed C.

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806John, the church thought Mendel and others were on their way to scientifically proving the bible.  If the Vatican had known Mendelian genetics would wind up confirming Darwin's big idea, he would have been as popular as Galileo and Copernicus.  Doing something based in reality wasn't the church's big hope for him.

So the modern Catholic Church still believes the world is flat and the Earth is the center of the Universe?  And, if not, why did they change their mind?

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806The idea that everyone was convinced of Iraq's WMD is a fine example of revisionist history gaining popularity in a short time.  Hans Blix was given full access by Saddam and found nothing - a result so inconvenient that the Bush administration attempted to interfere with his investigation on every level.  Here in Australia we had Andrew Wilkie.  In Britain, David Kelly was hounded to suicide for publicly maintaining that Iraq had nothing.  There were street protests and masses of media reportage on this topic, and forgetting it is an achievement in itself.

From Hans Blix's testimony before the UK Iraq Inquiry on Tuesday 27 July 2010:

Quote from: Hans BlixSo I was cautious all the way through, but this was the reason why I changed my view. I talked to Prime Minister Blair on 20 February 2002 and then I said I still thought that there were prohibited items in Iraq but at the same time our belief, faith in intelligence had been weakened. I said the same thing to Condoleezza Rice. Both Condoleezza Rice and Prime Minister Blair, I sort of alerted to the fact that we were sceptical. I made the remark that I cited many times, that: wouldn't it be paradoxical for you to invade Iraq with 250,000 men and find very little.

...also...

Quote from: Hans BlixOf course, we could not exclude -- sometimes we get too much credit and say, "You were right. You said there were no weapons of mass destruction". We did not say so. We said, "We have not found any". After 700 inspections and going to sites given to us, we did not find any, which is not the same thing. We did not exclude, but we didn't -- I mean, Mr Blair said that we didn't find the truth, but we found the untruth of some of the allegations, and that was important enough.

...or how about this...

Quote from: Hans BlixHowever, it seemed plausible to me at the time, and I also felt -- I, like most people at the time, felt that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction. I did not say so publicly. I said it perhaps to Mr Blair in September 2002 privately, but not publicly because I think there is a big difference between your role as a trustee of the Security Council, "Investigate this and report to us", and the role of a politician. Individual governments here could prosecute and say, "We are accusing you, you have this", but that was not my role. The Security Council did not assume it and therefore I didn't say anything about it publicly. Privately, yes, I thought so.

So there are three quotes by Hans Blix saying that he not only didn't say that Iraq had no WMDs but that he probably confided that he, "like most people at the time", actually thought that they did to Tony Blair in 2002.

OK, so how about Andrew Wilkie?  Here is an interview with him from 2004:

Quote from: InterviewANDREW WILKIE: I believe that Saddam Hussein had a limited and disjointed WMD program.

MARK COLVIN: So you believe that he did have them, just not enough to justify war?

ANDREW WILKIE: Absolutely, it all came back to my fundamental argument that Iraq didn't pose a serious enough security threat to justify a war, not least because his conventional military was weak, there was no evidence of active co-operation with al-Qaeda, and because his WMD program was limited. It was always well short of what our Government and the governments in Washington and London were claiming.

MARK COLVIN: But you, like the intelligence community which you then disassociated yourself from, and like most of the UN weapons inspectors and like the Americans and like the British all thought that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

ANDREW WILKIE: I certainly thought.

MARK COLVIN: On what basis did you think it?

ANDREW WILKIE: Based on the hard intelligence I saw and the assessments I saw I was fairly sure that he did have, Saddam did have some sort of limited program and almost certainly had a small number of weapons.

How about David Kelly?  According to this Guardian article:

Quote from: ArticleHe also argued that there was evidence Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons and regime change, the policy of the United States, was the only way to stop the Iraqi dictator.

According to full MoD statement on the Gilligan meeting:

"He has said that, as an expert in the field, he believes Saddam Hussein possessed WMD"

So they all thought that Iraq had WMD to some degree, right?

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806The issue here is one of degree. Within the intelligence community there was high confidence in how I just described it, but it was always fairly ambiguous, and the information being provided to government always was carefully worded to reflect that ambiguity.

The reality is that everyone was guessing.  When people guess, some people guess right and some people guess wrong.  But that's not the same thing as being "reality challenged", which was your claim.  Were there people who claimed that Iraq had no WMDs before the invasion and subsequent investigation gave many more people the 20/20 hindsight to claim that they'd known Iraq was lying all along?  Of course there were.  But they were guessing, too, or engaged in wishful thinking that turned out true because they opposed war.  But weren't you the one quipping about a broken clock being wrong twice a day?  

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806Reality is liberal once again, and that's before we even start asking why the right believes Saudis training Saudis in Saudi to fly planes into American skyscrapers is a clear case for invading...Iraq.

But the people you mentioned all believed that Iraq had WMD and they were wrong, too.

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806As predicted, you leapt on communism with gusto, and it's easy to understand why.  Two millennia of conservatives being greatly mistaken not only in matters of ideology but fiercely resisting basic facts of the universe is a lot easier to ignore when there's a huge leftist error of judgement within the last century.

Uh, huh.  Yeah, that was just a minor one-off "leftist error of judgement" and we should give the left another chance at running things because they promise not to murder 100 million people the next time, right?  Would you feel better if I used the French Revolution and Robespierre's Reign of Terror as an example of leftists gone wild, instead?  Or was that just another one-off "error of judgement" that just happened to lead to mass murder?  And when the social welfare systems in the Western World collapse under the weight of ever increasing costs and aging populations, will that just be another minor "error in judgement", too?  Yeah, I know.  Being on the left means never having to say you're sorry because your intentions are just so noble and pure, if the bodies start piling up like cordwood, that's not really the left's fault.  It's just a little oopsie on the way to Utopia and you just need to try again.  You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, right?

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806It's an interesting comparison to make, though, because it demonstrates the superior ability of liberals to get to grips with reality even after some deviation.  You don't find many enthusiastic western communists any more, and certainly not in positions of influence, but the right can't wait to delete basic theories from science textbooks and hand over the nuclear codes to people who call foreign leaders in the dead of night to say that Gog and Magog have arisen in the middle east and must be fought by the forces of light.

I like the lawyerly qualifiers you put in there and the straw man you end with is precious.  No, nobody like a White House Communications Director would ever call Mao Tse Tung one of their favorite political philosophers these days, right?  And if some mean old conservative were to call them out over it, then the conservative would be the bad guy, right?

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806No shit.  In the 21st century the American right elected to the most powerful office in the world a man who believes his primary role is to hasten a supernatural apocalypse.  And now more of the same are lining up for a shot at the title.  Can you identify any popular western leftist who comes even close to such disdain for reality?

And what makes you think George W. Bush believed "his primary role is to hasten a supernatural apocalypse"?  Since you have such a deep respect for reality, surely you can provide me with the quotes or evidence to back up that assertion, right?  Or does your "reality" include ESP that lets you know what George W. Bush was really thinking?

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806And, of course, prior to the horrific century of left-sponsored communism, there were 2000 years of Christian pogroms, Inquisitions and crusades.  Compared to cultural conservatives, leftists are amateurs at this mass-killing business.

Really?  Then why is the leftist body count so much larger in just one century?  Why don't you tell me how many people Christians killed through pogroms, inquisitions, and crusades over centuries, with your sources, and let's compare the numbers.  Since reality is biased toward the left, you should have no problem proving this assertion, right?  Oh, wait!  You do have a problem with that because you apparently know that reality is not going to be kind to your position.  So much for that left-biased reality.

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806Even in the 20th century, liberal support for communism was based on a belief that it would improve the lives of human beings here and now, for evidence-based reasons.  The religious right, meanwhile, has been killing people for century after century because they disagreed with the specifics of middle eastern folktales, or placed greater value on data and observation than the edicts of a pope.  Even when the left fucks up, it's more grounded in reality than the right.

You really do believe that this is all a fair and accurate characterization of reality, don't you?  If reality is really on your side, why do you have to warp it to make your point?

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806Now please don't reply with comparative body counts.  It would be embarrassing to have to explain why a Stalin can kill more people in a population of millions with machinery and firearms than Catholic crusaders could with swords and fire in a sparse population.

But Stalin and Mao didn't kill most of their people with machinery and firearms.  They starved them, which was certainly an available option in the Middle Ages.  Plenty of people who died during the Cultural Revolution died at the hands of young people without guns, too.  You do know all that, right?  You also realize the Khmer Rouge managed to kill about a third of Cambodia's population largely hacking and beating people to death and rarely using guns because ammunition was valuable and limited, right?  

Basically, you are illustrating why the left believes reality is biased to the left.  You aren't actually presenting evidence or logical arguments to prove your points (in some cases, I know you can't because you are wrong) but simply guess and make it up as you go, confident that since reality is biased to the left, things must work the way you image you do.  

Quote from: Hairfoot;427806Reality has a liberal bias.  Now if you'll excuse me I have to go and make my way in a society that's been reduced to a smoking ruin by women's suffrage and the insidious plague of black jazz musicians.  Hopefully I won't be struck by lightning today for being a blasphemer.  These are, after all, unarguable facts that cannot be ignored.

No, it's a straw man but this isn't the Yellow Brick Road.