That crappy Wal-Mart merchandise is only a good deal until the plant closes, and our interests are not exactly served by the amount of gasoline that it takes to ship the stuff halfway around the world…not to mention the carbon footprint and human rights issues, but I digress.

Shudders. How evil of them.

Wow…how shameful.

Lemme guess. You think the bailouts are necessary? You and Bush.

Hmmmm, don’t recall any conservatives sayign that they would leave the country, that was just idiot liberals. We conservative plan to stay and fight, get our country back from this Marxist-trained, socialist moron that is now in the White House. So far, my ‘cut’ of the stimulus amounts to a whopping $2 per check…but it is going to cost me my entire takehome pay for a year. Thanks.

it’s ok. it’ll be forgotten about in a few months and everyone will deny having been to it. they’re the ones who aught to be ashamed for being so gullible and manipulatable.

-hangs head in shame-

But really their reaction is probably going to be “By god! What is that metal bird flying in the sky? Why does it make such a sound? I’m frightened of the horseless carriages!!”

*pats on back* There, there. Normalize the blood pressure. Hoshit! That lady has a tomato!

Just kidding, calm down. Relax.

Patriotism in it’s purest form is just the belief that your country is better than another, or ANY other, whether informed or not. And since it seems like 9/10 people in this country have never been outside of it, I have my doubts as to the definition of “informed” for any of us, since by and large our media comes and is absorbed from just THIS country and it’s views on other worldly focal points.

*yawn* Just keep getting blown by the government, dude. You’ll die before you ever matter.

I am simply calling it as it has been shown to me. I thanked you for correcting me a while back and you spat it right back at me. Seth is being diplomatic here and you are doing the same. And everytime in between where somebody tries to seriously be diplomatic with you, you smack it aside.

And if you feel sucker punched because I am calling you on your shit, that is your problem. I am just sick of watching your self victimized angst over and over.

So plank in my eye, stick in your @ss, whatever. I have nothing to feel superior about, no more or less than you do. We are both just guys blathering on a damn lolsite because we have time between actual work.

A kind word offered in one breath doesn’t cancel out the condescension offered in the next. It’s a lame “love, 52%” tactic, and if you’re trying to keep this place civil, quite frankly, it’s beneath you. If we’re going to get into the amateur psychoanalysis, consider how you feel superior by offering up a few token nuggets while sucker-punching with the other hand.

Speck in my eye, plank in your own, and all that.

You simply can’t let it just be a kind gesture or a statement of good faith.

Even this statement won’t get through to you, it will just be waved off as a “you called it” scenario in your head. It is how you escape ever having to apologize for your actions or ever being responsible for your comments.

Sidenote: Lynn might finish my crocheted Cthulhu today! XD

When black households have the lowest median income, when black teenagers are nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school as white teenagers, when black people are five times as likely as white people to be in jail, it’s clear that there still exists a disparity between the life experiences of black people (and probably many other minorities) and the life experiences of white people.

Now, I don’t know for sure that standing against mistreatment is going to fix anything, but I do know that if black people “shut their mouths and suffered in silence,” (which, BTW, sounds a lot like “know your place”), their lot would not improve and might grow worse.

Most Islamic fundamentalists have little or no interest in flying airplanes into buildings and/or killing innocent civilians. Killing innocent civilians is, in truth, absolutely haram (forbidden) by Islam for civilians who are “people of the book” (Christians and Jews, that is.) But let’s not split hairs.

I acquired my patriotism through knowledge and experience. It is NOT blind. It is NOT unthinking. I am very proud of my country and almost everything it stands for.

I do not understand those who do not love their country-in my mind it’s much akin to hating your mother. There are rare cases where one would be fully justified in hating one’s mother, but one never has an excuse for disrespecting or badmouthing her.

Yall who have a deep, abiding hatred for your own country need to take a long hard look at your points of view.

And grow up.

There seems to be a lot of people in the USA who believe that America is the greatest country on the planet, just by definition. They will accept no criticism, no suggestion that the country isn’t meeting its ideals. The USA was founded on wonderful ideals, but that doesn’t mean we’re sticking to them these days.

Patriotism centers on the ideals of a country, and on making that country meet those ideals. Nationalism is groupism, us versus them, the in-group is good and safe simply because they’re close, or identify using the same label, and the out-group is wrong and bad and dangerous because they’re different in some way, use a different name to describe themselves.

I’d say we see a lot of the second kind of behavior between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives”, or “Democrats” and “Republicans”, in the USA. They make up horror stories about each other, and don’t really try to work together, or have honest discussions. Each side simply believes that the other side is evil, and wants to take over the country for no reason.

Estimates of attendance range from 800,000 to 3,000,000. Let’s split the difference and call it 1,900,000 people. Assume not everyone carried a flag. I will use the WAG theory and call it 50% of attendees carried a flag, giving us 850,000 portable flags and uncounted flags placed as decorations. Now, 7000 flags is .8% of the 850,000 flags, suggesting that 99.2% of all flags were retained by good, patriotic liberals.
I’m sorry, what was your point, again?

Still, the first thing that went through my mind while reading it was, “Hmm, didn’t the 9/11 hijackers all enter the USA legally, mostly on student visas? I wonder how many of the people Sisyphusredux was watching were actually terrorists trying to get in and hurt us?”