The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Wild Card => Topic started by: jay-ell on June 26, 2011, 06:24:07 pm
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Fight for my amusement!
It's been a while since we had a knock-down, drag-out debate around here. Those were good times. Anybody up for a sparring match? Here's the topic (or propose your own):
Justice is:
(a) an eye for an eye
(b) to turn the other cheek
Discus!
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Oh no you don't.
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Fight for my amusement!
I'll be happy to engage and rhetoric and debate for your amusement. There's just the small matter of my retainer to discuss...
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The number of debates took a serious hit when Aloha Dawg left. And Arachno hasn't been around much to spar with LFM.
The rest of us are either too old or our opinions are too homogenous to foster a good debate.
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But in some cases it is: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.
Why is it always the women who are responsible for the lamentation?
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are those the only choices?
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No! Come up with an alternative and fight for it!
Also, I saw a kid who looked very like what I imagine you looked like as a teen today, GKA. He was heading out of Target as I was going in, it was weird. I thought, "Oh, he looks like someone I know...on the internet...might have looked...fifteen years ago..."
Odd. Oddsfish.
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Justice is a case by case determination with both sides having adequate representation and playing by the same rules. Some general penalty guidelines if found culpable are acceptable.
NO JUSTICE NO PEACE.
There ain't no such thing as justice in this country.
Fuckin' Man all trying to keep me down . . . grumble grumble . . .
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Also, I saw a kid who looked very like what I imagine you looked like as a teen today, GKA. He was heading out of Target as I was going in, it was weird. I thought, "Oh, he looks like someone I know...on the internet...might have looked...fifteen years ago..."
Odd. Oddsfish.
ugh. i have a very low opinion of what i looked like as a teen. hopefully your imagination did a better job.
anyway, the matter at hand:
a) i think "an eye for an eye" is less vengeance-oriented than most people believe. the only downfall is deciding, as a society, which eye to take and the appropriate way to take it.
b) "turn the other cheek" is equivalent to mercy, which is not justice.
c) i believe our current system, while in need of an overhaul, is the best one out there.
p.s.-
several months ago i took a gen ed english comp course in school that centered on "here are the types of arguments you should avoid while debating topics", persuasive writing, and etc.. we would always take class time to debate hot-button issues and there was always lively discussions. i got a C because i was lame about turning in homework. the thing that saved me was getting a B on the final paper. i wanted to research the topic of "distracted driving" with a concentration on "texting while driving". i knew it was going to be too easy to find sources to support an argument against it; its common sense. so i wrote about how making and enforcing an anti-texting-while-driving agenda are useless and ineffective.
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What does justice even mean, man, y'know?
(Firm if somewhat theoretical advocate of turning the other cheek, but I'm not sure what justice has to do with it.)
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Nothing. Its about harmony. Justice is unnecessary if everyone gets along. Turning the other cheek gives the barbarian a chance to mend his ways.
(Firm if somewhat theoretical advocate of turning the other cheek, but I'm not sure what justice has to do with it.)
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It's about the almighty dollar, is what it's about. Poor man can't get ju$tice in this broke-ass country.
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The poor man can get all the Justice he can get up off his ass and go take.
Whatever, Man.
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just like with love, nice guys dont finish last, weak guys do.
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In my mind I imagine Nabu saying that in the affected sullen tone of a teeager who's really meaning 'fuck you.'
a la mini-smick
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The poor man can get all the Justice he can get up off his ass and go take.
That's what JL was looking for. Why isn't anyone biting? Are we all Republicans now?
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Yeah, probably rich people just care more about their murdered family members.
Also: it is hard to "take" justice if you are dead.
Justice isn't something you should have to "take."
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But what about the dead guy who doesn't have anyone to "take" justice for him? Doesn't he deserve justice, too?
Plenty of ambulance chasers looking to put a necktie on someone for a backend spec if the police don't jump.
I have no idea what the hell this means.
There has never, in the history of mankind, been a more prolonged application of technology and resources to the benefit of the (formerly) under served.
I mean, you could say this about anything. The fact that something is better than it used to be does not mean it is fixed, or good.
Also, I live ~2 miles west of the Mississippi.
I haven't seen any ladies in barrios crying on TV, just lots of people looking for pretty, dead white girls.
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But what about the dead guy who doesn't have anyone to "take" justice for him? Doesn't he deserve justice, too?
i think that once a person is no longer sharing air, he has no need of earthly justice. (my spiritual leanings play a part in this idea)
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Again, you seem to be saying that people who don't get justice just arent caring hard enough
And GKA, the point is more about the perpetrator than the victim in my statement. I guess once I am dead I will not really care about anything.
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Don't even make me talk about you Southern bastiges. You people need to jump in a hole and pull it in after you.
Hey, fuck you very much. Don't drag me into this.
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Whatever, you fascist (http://youtu.be/ANquX0YHFhw).
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man, sometimes you are really hard to like.
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We are amused. Carry on!
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It is the police's job to give a shit about people dying. That is why I pay taxes. I shouldn't have to drive over to the police station and yell at them, or hire a lawyer. If customers had to yell at me for me to do my job, I would get fired. I don't give two shits about some damn hoss deciding not to drink.
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Being an active member of your community sometimes means being the person who stands up and says 'this is some bullshit, we need to fix this'.
It irks me when people do so and then get dragged down by folks saying 'Well fuck you, why aren't you fixing it? You've got no right to say anything until you're working tirelessly to fix everything yourself.' The two things aren't even related, it might make a person a hypocrite because their lazy asses won't fix it themselves but it doesn't make them wrong that shit needs to get done.
Being too accepting that a system is fundamentally broken and we need to carry the load ourselves just leads to the system getting more broken. Fixing a system means making sure people know it needs fixing.
We are amused. Carry on!
I think the real question here is what is wrong with people that we are so willing to flagellate each other for our fascist head of state's amusement?
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In the interests of starting another argument, something I was thinking the other day (though not in quite such strong terms).
Why the fuck do we still have a working class? Most of us live in countries that by rights should contain the best educated citizens in the world, why do we still need to employ a huge proportion of people in jobs that don't require a highschool diploma? I'm not talking about skilled labour here, I'm talking about people who work in the same factory job their dad did for 20 years and then get surprised when their factory gets closed down because the government is tired of propping up a failing industry with bailouts and tariffs.
It worries me because developing countries that are already better at us in manufacturing and similar industries are only getting smarter, so if we don't focus on creating an educated workforce we're going to get left in their dust. And it offends me because a decent proportion of my income has and will go to ensuring free education for every citizen up to and including university level education (not to mention welfare for people undertaking studies and so on... including myself currently, but still) so when people blow off knowledge because they believe (and in fairness are indoctrinated to believe by those around them) that school is some bullshit and they'll be able to get a job a monkey could do with zero qualifications it shits me off. I hear a lot about my generation being entitled, but at least most of my friends go out and work for degrees and so on before they complain about not being able to get a job.
I suspect in reality the real answer is 'the *****s to replace them aren't cheap enough, yet' because hell knows there's no room for sentimentalism in industry. I know making your job too much a part of your identity is considered unhealthy but with all the resources at our disposal in a first world country isn't the fact that some people are still just shooting for 'paper cup machine QA' a bit bloody sad?
These have been the opinions of an upper-middle class white boy, we now return you to our regular programming.
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You're comparing your job to an understaffed and overwhelmed public agency. This is invalid.
The are understaffed and overwhelmed because people like you refuse to pay taxes in this country. Your point is invalid.
Let the people build themselves up, I've got mine- how did you get yours? Maybe because people in your situation were more realistic about the world they lived in and gave you a chance through the possibility of jobs with decent pay? A decent tax rate so you didn't have to solve crime yourself? I remember the Clinton years enough to know that when you were going for what inev and I are going for it was a hell of a lot easier to get.
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I remember the Clinton years enough to know that when you were going for what inev and I are going for it was a hell of a lot easier to get.
slick willy was a friend to dog walkers, i guess.
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That was not funny or meaningful in any way. Go fuck yourself.
I went to college, got a fine gpa and looked for a job for over a year. That is when I started doing mindless shit I hate.
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understood and agreed.
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Oh, I am getting on.
I walk dogs well enough that I get to walk dogs for 14 hours tomorrow and hopefully I will make enough to feed myself. At the same time, I could be wrong, but we probably tax the people in your tax bracket less than any other western nation, and I am pretty sure you vote for the people that keep it that way (well, unless you vote green or something we all do, I guess). So all I am saying is that if you are in that situation you don't get to bitch about public services being underfunded or tell people to get over it.
Also, didn't we raise taxes to get us out of that 42 month crater you mentioned? And then W lowered them again, and then something in September and then, oh, poorly fought republican wars that we can't even think about cutting the budget for...
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understood and agreed.
I shouldn't have said that, I am sorry. I was initially really happy to walk dogs, because I thought it would be better than my previous, meaningless gig. It isn't.
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I would like to emphasize here that I am only amused insofar as you guys are debating political points and not criticizing one another's lifestyle choices.
Let's fight nicely, kids.
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I pay a fuckton of taxes and if you can show me a streamlined delivery I'll pay even more.
To be fair, you and I pay our fair share, but a lot of folks in our boat don't, and try their best to pay even less. Not to get in too deeply, but there's a lot more $ tied up in tax breaks for shit like mortgage interest (not getting collected) than there is for welfare (getting collected and spent). We can discuss whether that money gets turned around and put back in the system if you want, but poor folks aren't stuffing food stamps in their mattresses and coffee cans in the back yard. Also, I love each and every one of you.
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Well, obviously recent experiments vis-a-vis home ownership being a societal benefit overall have resulted in, shall we say, mixed results. I'm just saying a) people shouldn't bitch about the little guy when they're a larger overall drain, and b) I'd have been just fine without the tax break - it's just gravy - and I'm betting you would have been fine too. I wouldn't have a problem with them getting rid of some or all of those kind of breaks. There's probably a pool there that buy homes that wouldn't without the gov't handout, but that money could be applied somewhere else. Society does derive a long-term benefit from stable families, it's true. Home ownership probably is a stabilizing factor for some families, although there's piles of anecdotal evidence that home owners fuck shit up, too.
But society would also benefit from giving some of that money to single-parent homes to provide child-care so those parents could go to school. It could also benefit from providing more counseling and education and medical care to pregnant teens, or hell, even to teens that are sexually active and not yet pregnant. It wouldn't hurt to try to give more of a hand to folks who can't seem to get off the drugs. It might help, also, to get rid of those limits that kick in when people get too much of one type of public assistance, making it so they can't get school loans or other types of help. I guess I'm just saying that - and maybe it's my bleeding heart - I tend to feel more for folks that are further down the social strata. Maybe it's white guilt. Maybe it's being stuck in a bastion of neo-con Fox "news" watching fascists. Maybe it's my innate capacity for love.
Look what you've done - you've turned me into 'sMets. When did I get so fuck*ng wordy?
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I won't argue that the guys in charge will probably fuck it up, but that's not what my original point was. And I'm not sure I quite follow your point about mixing the types of income streams. I was focused on fed taxes, because it's easy to make a sort of "this much goes in, this much comes out" comparison. For me, the state issue/sales tax thing is sort of not what I was getting at. That's a whole 'nother kettle of giraffe. As an illustration of the folks in charge fuck*ng things up, it's a dandy, though.
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But getting at new revenue streams is being implemented by a bunch of cock-arsed mental deficients. Example: California just decided to have all retailers in state or with an in state presence (good luck defining that without a court war) collect sales tax. This is aimed at out of state internet purchases. Amazon said 'fuck you very much' and severed ties with their affiliates that have any sort of presence in California. End result? No new income from internet sales and a decline in revenues from the in state retailers that got hosed out of an Amazon relationship that was helping them move product.
What surprised me about this was, did the legislature not do any research at all before passing this? Because it seems to me that exactly this thing has happened before. A few years ago I lost a really easy web writing gig because the site had to stop doing Amazon affiliate sales and, having lost its source of income, could no longer pay writers. They were based in North Carolina and if I recall correctly it was due to a similar change in state law there.
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Okay, we've talked politics long enough.
People actually believe this (http://youtu.be/_ASzDDOaLyk).
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when i open a jar of peanut butter, the end result is a mouthgasm, because that shit is tasty.
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I got that motherfucker - he hasn't opened every jar of peanut butter ever.
Not to mention it's clear that jar was already opened! He took the new life out, that bastard.
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It's quite clear what happened. Obviously the night before filming the presenter would have been a bit tense and prayed for it to go off all right, G-d would have heard that prayer and then intervened. As evolution is caused by the devil and G-d can easily thwart the Great Adversary it would have been the work of a moment to cast out all the natural selection demons from the pot. After which He presumably retired to watch a parasitic worm eat a toddler's eye from the inside out somewhere in central Africa without intervening due to ineffability.
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His shit is always so inscrutable.
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god made man
but he used a monkey to do it
Why, God? Why?
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So like a . . . like a human centipede?
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But not like a . . . you know, a human (http://blog.arondenim.com/?attachment_id=2948) centipede (http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/7186/humancentipede.jpg).
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But not like a . . . you know, a human (http://blog.arondenim.com/?attachment_id=2948) centipede (http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/7186/humancentipede.jpg).
(http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4083/5083300168_beb813af01.jpg)
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HUMANCENTiPAD (http://www.forgetfoo.com/images/blog/South-Park-Human-Centipede.jpg). (Edit: Possibly, perhaps probably, NSFW)
Anyone else see that episode? The Cartman getting fucked by his mom gag killed me.
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I do enjoy a nicely-played GOOD LORD.
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You lot need to learn some lessons from the civilised side of the Atlantic
EDIT: I'm too late
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You lot need to learn some lessons from the civilised side of the Atlantic
EDIT: I'm too late
you guys colonized all the good places, anyway.