MTG Salvation

Quote from mystery45

A 4th grade english teacher pulled a common core sheet from LA. for homework the students took it home. It happened to be on ebonics. (why we are teaching ebonics instead of english to 4th graders i don't know).

Three things. First, links for any of this?
Second, I find it highly ironic that a person who often makes posts devoid of proper grammar is going to be the one to complain about the dirth of education as it relates to English and grammar teaching. A salient example is how you start this thread.
"It is enough to say that our education system here in america is well bad."
ought to read
"It is enough to say that our education system here in America is, well, bad."
because "well bad" as a phrase doesn't really mean anything.
But that's beside the point.
Third, why are you opposed to the teaching of ebonics? As much of a stickler for grammar and punctuation as I am I think there is GREAT value in teaching culture and ebonics is very much emblematic of a particular American culture and the grammars created within that culture.

After some cursory research turning up Fox News, Personal Liberty, and Infowars links, it seems the offending paragraphs are a) NOT ABOUT TEACHING ENGLISH b) are about history c) are referencing the title of a very famous piece of art, and d) are not "filled with Ebonics" as you, Alex Jones, and other misguided right wingers claim. Seriously stop presenting it as the dichotomy of "Why are we teaching Ebonics instead of ENGLISH?!" and start saying what you really mean. "Why are we teaching our kids about BLACK PEOPLE in history!!!" because that's what the outrage is about.

There's also no reference to "hoes" just the title of the song 'Po Pimp'

Should we not be teaching Al Capone in history, you know, because Mobster? Should we not be teaching Georgia O'Keefe in art, you know, because vaginas?

On a similar notion of the voting rights act take a look at the percentages. There are a few northern states (Delaware, New Jersey) that have a large number of African Americans on welfare, but the worst states are all Southern states that were listed under the VRA.

Alabama: 66%
Arkansas: 58.2%
Florida: 46.6
Gerogia: 70.2%
Louisiana: 78%
Mississippi: 83.6%
North Carolina: 58.6
South Caroline: 69.2
Tennessee: 53.6

Kentucky, Kansas, and Missouri are the only 3 Southern States with a higher percentage of whites than Afro-Americans on welfare.

Of course though, racism ended in the form of job discrimination in the 70s

Reductio ad absurdum isn't a logical fallacy... It's a logical debate tactic to show that when the opponent's logic is tested in extreme examples it fails to hold true. Logic ought to strive for universal applicability. Reductio ad absurdum is used to show that it fails said test.

Quote from billydaman

Quote from hyalapterouslemur

Quote from billydaman

What exactly makes it racism? Please be as detailed as possible. I encourage my opponents from the other thread to answer this since they consistently ignored it there.

Dude, this is a new low. Okay, if you suspect someone is a criminal due to that individual's race (even though more white people are caught with drugs in NYC, but that's another argument), you're a racist. That's...kinda the definition of racist.

Hey, what's racist about thinking race is an intrinsic quality and that certain races are inferior to others?

Do you actually think I'm defending racial profiling? The other guys were saying it was not racist to think about a race having an intrinsic quality that indicates a superior/inferior reaction to words. i.e. white people do not have an equally powerful word to be used against them as blacks have ******.

WHICH EVERYONE SINGLE ONE OF US SAID WAS A RESULT OF HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONNOTATIONS AND NOT BECAUSE OF THE GOD DAMN COLOR OF YOUR ****ING SKIN THAT IS GENETIC.

This straw manning is getting ****ing old. Stop it already. No one said white skin means that you are born less able to be insulted by words. What HAS been said is that there is NO word to describe white people in a negative way that carries the derogatory nature of n----- because of historical and current cultural connotations of power and supremacy.

Remember everyone, calling someone an idiot is just as bad as n------

First of all, this discussion about choosing to not give someone money being bullying is asinine. But more importantly it completely misses the point. Several people have pointed out that he's not going to change his views, that's whatever. The boycott is about not providing him money which gives him a platform to spread his beliefs. The only REAL response I've seen to this is "but he isn't gaining that much money from how well the movie does" and while that may be true in only the most strict sense what the boycott could, very well, accomplish is doing enough damage to the idea of the Ender's Game series as movies (which several people have listed as an unintended consequence of the boycott??) which would stop them from making a SECOND movie. Card makes a bunch of money off of the rights being sold for the movie, boycotting this one prevents that from happening for another movie.

Also, the whole "other people are anti-gay so this doesn't matter" is literally the worst excuse for anything ever. Other people will be racist is NOT justification to either a) be racist or b) be complacent when you see it. The same is true of homohatred. Whether or not this action will completely prevent Card from having a platform for his homohatred doesn't mean we should help him with said platform. More money is always better for these platforms.

Quote from mystery45

Quote from Senori

Quote from Catmurderer

So wait... 4th of July is a white holiday because we celebrate what white people did for our country?

That's absurd. We celebrate America. We aren't celebrating "Happy White People Accomplishments Day!"

On May 8th, 1945 for V-E day, we didn't celebrate accomplishments of white people. We celebrated our victory over the Nazi forces and the end to the Europe front of WWII. For the same reason your logic is flawed. You are putting the horse before the plow.

You're making the mistake of thinking that because these holidays aren't explicitly celebrated for white people, they aren't at all. But there's a vast difference between the ideals that large segments of the country celebrates and the practical reality of it. When a white man goes to a Fourth of July celebration and sees ten white soldiers and a black soldier who was especially brought there, that isn't multiculturalism, that's tokenism. It's still perpetuating the inherent racism of the project while pretending that the racism doesn't exist any more.

you are making the exact opposite mistake. you are making an huge assumption that they are strictly celebrated as white holiday's and they aren't.

this whole thing of "The Great White Guilt Trip" gets extremely old. to the point that it is obnoxious. fortuantly for me it doesn't work. I have no guilt.

4th of july celebrates the birth of our country.
memorial day celebrates the men and women of all races that died fighting for our country.

to say that they are explicitly white celebrations is logically flawed. it is also a bit of a my-optic point of view.

Myopic. Myopic is the word you're looking for. My-optic doesn't mean anything. Myopic.

Anyways, I disagree with this sentient largely because it ignores the history of the founding of our nation. Celebrating the "birth of our nation" is in large part a white celebration because the only people that were citizens in said founding were white male landowners. Do you really think the 4th of July celebrates indigenous persons in America?

You presume that just because something is not de jure white it cannot be de facto white.

Wait a minute, weren't the same MRAs in this thread the ones upset about the congresswoman's "No means no" comment about vaginal ultrasounds because of the connection with that phrase and rape? And these same people are defending "It'll all be over soon"?

Quote from Studoku

This doesn't work for two reasons.

First, you can't dredge stinky imp if you don't have 5 cards in your library. You need to be able to put x cards from your library into your graveyard to dredge a card.

Second, Laboratory Maniac can only replace attempting to draw a card. It will not replace attempting to mill an empty library.

2.5 Dredge is a replacement effect so it replaces the act of drawing a card and two replacement effects cannot effect the same event. There is no card draw for Lab Maniac to have you win the game, since maniac is also a replacement effect.

Quote from Zaphrasz

Quote from hyalapterouslemur

More accurately, men are far more likely to commit a violent crime.

Not more accurately, just as accurately.

Please don't respond to "men are more likely to be the victim of violent crime" with "men commit more violent crime." Victim blaming is frowned upon.

I don't think the phrase "victim blaming" means what you think it means.

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Here is what I think is sad about all of this. A US controlled drone kills a group of people going to a wedding in Yemen and nobody really cares. Some special interest groups lobby a network to kick someone off a show for saying something offensive and everyone goes nuts.

Hey I'm just as guilty though because I created this thread and didn't create one for Yemen so let me be the first in line to be called a hypocrite.

Quote from bLatch

Quote from hyalapterouslemur

Oh, you knocked me out over this one. I'm still seeing stars. Speaking of stars, Reagan also based much of his policy on his horoscope, which approaches Caligula-class insanity.

citation?

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20099022,00.html

I assume it's because he was from California; the John Birch Society (which backed Reagan throughout his political career) opposed the polio vaccine, psychiatry, and water fluoridation as communist plots.

I could've mentioned that Reagan supported apartheid too. And he thought Indians were "quite rich" from oil on our preservations [sic], which were given [sic] to us by the government. Seriously, I don't get people's Ronald Reagan fetish.

Quote from BatterysRevenge

Polygamy (and polyandry for that matter) would wreak havoc on the tax code, insurance law, and family law. As if these three things aren't already complicated to the point of ridiculousness.

Same-sex marriage is sticky enough with full faith and credit and the SCOTUS not taking a side due to the alleged lack of ripeness.

So... we should throw people in jail because their lifestyle is a paperwork mess?

If you didnt read the thread.... a man simply living with multiple wives (having a common law marriage) can face up to 20 years in prison.

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I'd like to wax poetic on some ideas held by society. Please criticize openly because I'm honestly curious what the rest of you think about some of these ideas.

My initial thought was Nationalism. I understand a lot of you are not from the United States so please accept that is from my perspective and please enlighten me as to how different it is in your culture. The idea that we American's are better than those Syrians more specifically. This stemmed from the news that we (our figure head and speaker for all of us) were threatening to kill Syrians with fire because Syrians were killing Syrians with poison. If I had to make a choice between dyeing by fire and dyeing by poison - I have to admit - I'd take the longest amount of time aloud for me to decide including the time it took for whoever was doing the killing to make up their own mind so that I could live that little bit longer. People killing people over resources. People killing people over beliefs. People killing people over moral standings. You have to be kidding me. America has the biggest war machine. That's it. We're not the physically largest country, most populated country, the most educated country, the country with the best economy, or the most humanistic country. We may not even be the richest country financially considering the oil sheikhs. Google it if you think I'm crazy.

Before you sane people scream, "Leave if you don't like it!" - I'm proud of the America I grew up thinking existed but as my critical thinking skills improved I realized that country no longer exists and quite possibly never existed.

Eventually my mind wandered to the other ideas of pride. Gay pride, white power and black power groups, state pride (*cough*TEXAS*cough*), etc. Being proud of a completely uncontrollable coin flip of your accidental birth seems insane to me. Some of you may have the mindset that being homosexual is a choice but let us assume for argument's sake that homosexuality is a trait you are born with as some portion of society claim is true. Being proud of your genetics is like being proud to have been born on earth or be alive during the 21st century. Congratulations, you did absolutely nothing, what shall we engrave on your medal of achievement. Being proud to be alive? Well, you actually could have influenced that. Are you proud to not be in jail? Yeah, you made the right choices, congratulations. Proud to be a democrat? Well, I have to let that one slide too since it is a choice. You know who should be proud of the people who happen to have hazel eyes? Their parents. It's neither your fault nor your choice, hair dye be damned. They put in the work to get you from genetic material to human being and it was mostly your mom. Tell her how proud you are that she carried you long enough for you to survive outside of the womb because you had nothing to do with it.

This is the nature of discrimination. You can't help what you were born as but people can hate you for it all the same. It is our differences that we fight about. I'm excited to be human. I'm excited to live in the technological age. Due to my experience dating members of the opposite sex and having had a relationship with a black woman for almost three years, I am excited to both be male and white considering the absolute **** that women and black people have to put up with from people genetically similar to myself. But I'm not proud of any of it. I didn't check the box before birth that gave me these genetic characteristics. That would be stupid.

We have finally reached religion. There is a lot of talk in the news media today about religious discrimination. Let's analyze that completely outside of the arguments usually brought up when discussing religion. In the interest of keeping this completely free of my own religious vitriol, I present to you a scenario that I hope the majority could understand without finding it offensive. Please accept that there are two major religious beliefs in society and they are called Sponge Bob and Blue's Clues. There is also the non believers who we can call atheists since it is the absence of belief and shouldn't be offensive to anyone who understands that. Now the Sponge Bob believers and the Blue's Clues believers for the most part accept that their ideas are simply different but are also simply ideas and not worth waging war over. However, there is a small group in both religions that HATE the other side because they see it as two opposing sides, or teams if you will. Consequently, both groups receive a fair amount of criticism from each other and the atheists based on this small fraction of fundamentalists who refuse to even entertain the idea that other people in other parts of the world were raised differently and therefor made different life decisions? If you are a Blue's Clues believer for example; You may have been raised in the Blue's Clues religion, you may have read and accepted the Blue's Clues teachings, you may see the world in Blue's Clues colored glasses, and you may vehemently believe that anyone who does not accept the Blue's Clues doctrine as fact are damned for eternity. I ask then, why all the fuss? You choose every single day to be a Blue's Clues believer. You choose to tell the world you believe in the teachings of Blue's Clues. You're making a choice. By making that choice, I attest that you are also making the choice to accept the criticism of non Blue's Clues believers and openly express your reason behind your belief. If you choose to be a racist, you should be criticized - right? If you choose to act on your pedophile urges, you should be raped to death by the scary (and hopefully incarcerated) people that would do such a thing - right? So why, when you choose to believe in the teachings of Blue's Clues, can you not be questioned on that belief? What am I missing?

Then my contrarian inner voice spoke up. What about feminism? I was stumped for a little while. Then I came to the revelation that feminism isn't a proud to be a woman argument but rather an act against unwarranted inequalities based on genetic differences. Remember the equal rights movement? I wasn't alive for it so I can't say that I do but I understand the still relevant inequalities black people have to deal with by society at large here in the United States. You might have chosen to be a Blue's Clues believer, but you didn't choose to be a black woman in a country full of racist, sexist, egomaniacs during the 1700's for example. Only one of those three characteristics could you have hidden from society. You could potentially hide being gay, but only if you accept never having a relationship (or sex for that matter) again because someone always tells.

I guess what I'm saying is that despite my arguments, I'm proud to be a human. Scratch that, I'm on team human. I don't care what characteristics you were born with, I love you. Even if you're a jerk because your parents didn't love you enough. Even if you're a drug addict because you made poor decisions in life, I love you. Even if you can't stand the texture of cauliflower, I love you. But get your crap together because we need each other. One human is helpless against a pack of predators and we realized that fact long enough to create the civilization that we now have. We may not have to worry about lions, tigers, and bears and this may be the least violent, diseased, and accidental death prone point in history for us but maybe we could work on making the world a better place for one another regardless of the genetics we were born into or the choices we have made thus far.

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Quote from Befuddlement

Considering the small uproar (and subsequent apology) about Triumph of Ferocity, I'm interested they are pushing it again.

Let's not compare vague representation of a same-sex couple to the perception of a card's art depicting sexualized violence against women. You may want to draw comparisons based on both situations being talking points for social issues, but the two situations are quite different.

Quote from mystery45

the double cheeseburger went from 99 cents to 1.20 that is like a 30 cents increase per burger.

This math is amazing.

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