A Picture Speaks A Thousand Words
Found this cartoon online, and it sums up everything about this election:
Finally.
Well done to Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States of America.
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Something not quite right with the skin tones in that pic, but the point is well made.
Why is everyone forgetting half of this man? He is not the first black president, he is the first bi-racial president. It’s funny how the press likes to push false headlines to make money.
I voted for Obama because I felt he was the right man for the job, not because of how much melanin he has.
@emmy
For all intensive purposes, he is “black”. For me, the picture above most symbolizes change. If the first change had to be skin colour, so be it.
Yo, totally off topic but I just had to get this out.
I was talking to some missionaries (yeah) and asked them since Abraham was the first guy to bring God to the Israelites, where’d he come from? Apparently he’s from Ur, which is important. He’s Parsi. He was a Zoroastrian. Look it up. It means that all the Judeo-Christian-Islaamic religions stem from Zoroastrianism.
Some key shit nobody seems to be mentioning.
I think it’s awesome that we have a first black president…
but Barack Obama believes in God…
And as Joe Biden said in the vice-presidential debate… Barack Obama and Joe Biden oppose same sex marriage…
If you stand for individuality, people have equal rights, and all this… I don’t understand how you aren’t appalled at our two-party system for shutting out libertarians, constitutionalists, etc. We haven’t had one president who isn’t democrat or republican in more than 150 years… so in some ways this election isn’t changing anything.
@Bill
I think I’ve said consistently on this blog that you can believe in God and be good.
In the USA today, you cannot win an election by saying anything else regarding gay marriage. Attitudes will change with time.
Two party systems are inevitable for democracies. Whilst it is true that there have been no non-democrat and non-republican presidents, it is also true that the views of both parties have radically changed over the years.
Adrian,
Your rebuttals to my other post were fair… I’ll agree to disagree with you to an extent and I’m glad this blog is just your place rant… I have lots of respect for skepticism, but I am absolutely against absolutism =)… and that is just what I got at face value from this blog…
But anyways… are you saying the United States is a democracy?
If so… I know of a few significant people who would disagree with you…
“Democracy is the most vile form of government… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
-James Madison
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb in protest of the vote.”
-Ben Franklin
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
-Thomas Jefferson
@Ben
Ok, a few things here:
1) That is an appeal to authority and is a common logical fallacy. I could cite thousands of people who say good things about democracy, but I don’t because it doesn’t achieve anything.
2) These people were all U.S Presidents who despite their quotes were all elected through a democratic vote, so I fail to see your point.
3) Your quotes are further dismantled when you take them into context of the times. These men were all founding fathers of the USA, and at the time the only form of “democracy” was where people decided matters for everything, through meetings and decisions, and voting. This can be hardly said to be the current definition of a democracy today. Citing Dictionary.com:
So, in truth America is both the republic and the democracy. For further reading, I suggest you have a look at the Wikipedia article on Liberal Democracies
I’d also like to know your views on Jefferson’s quote, which seems to be quite hypocritical due to the fact that instead of 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%, in most elected governments there are less than 0.1% of the people taking away the rights. It was a total of 8 people who decided that upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine for racial segregation in 1896. So how exactly is this better than democracy?
I guarantee you more than 90% of the people in this country wouldn’t give the definition of liberal democracy if you asked them what defines democracy.
To your first point: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Ben Franklin were AGAINST authority being put in the hands of few! I didn’t use them as an appeal to authority… I used them as an appeal to anti-authority! They were some of the biggest rebels in history! I cited them to illustrate the dangers of democracy.
The point is that there has to be something that is held constant above a popular vote… not just free reign by the elected… hence a CONSTITUTION was written.
Many people forget this. Liberties are supposed to be granted to people regardless of what the majority thinks. Democracies are allowed to override things like the constitution… EVEN TODAY!
This country is a democratic-republic but people tend to act like sheep these days and let the government take over their lives.
Your example about the 8 people that upheld the separate but equal doctrine is a situation in which elected officials were suppressive to the liberties of the people and I guarantee you that if we were had been a pure democracy back, then it would have never been repealed. The civil rights movement is something that could have easily been shut out in a democracy. A popular vote can be used to give momentum to the suppression of the rights of minorities. This is supposed to be a country where people can stand up to the government and that reality is fading quickly because of the propagation of the idea that citizens here actually have power.
You are a lemming. My views on Jefferson’s quote: the fact that because 53% of the country believes Barack Obama should be president means that for another 4 years I’m going to continue to have 30+% of my income taken away from me (not counting all the other taxes I pay) to pay a group of people that meet about 70 days a year more than $170,000 a year with full benefits… a group of people who decide WITHOUT MY REPRESENTATION to support “charitable” organizations in which more than 50% of the money that goes into them goes to the bureaucrats that run them… a group of people that unanimously decided to allow themselves to listen to my phone conversations and monitor what I do on the Internet, a group of people that decide to print money when they want, bail out irresponsible corporations, etc. Maybe this illustrates my point…