The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[Bacon King]

Posts like these are why I keep coming to the Atlas:

Okay, I'm going to address Vosem's interpretation of the Mines of Moria scene, because this is going to bother me if I don't.

What Gandalf is saying in that scene is not limited to a commentary on the relationship between Frodo specifically and Gollum specifically. 'Even the wise cannot see all ends' is a remarkable statement coming from Gandalf, who, we read in the Silmarillion, is the wisest of the Maiar, a class of beings that also includes such luminaries as Melian and Uinen. The point is that the sort of knowledge that would be necessary to say whether somebody 'deserves' to live or die is practically impossible to obtain!

I would never claim that the Tolkien canon is a pacifist set of texts, or even a death penalty abolitionist one. (It also has...uncomfortable racial and sexual politics.) But what it does say is that killing is to be understood as something that one sometimes does to make a problem go away NOW, not because one has come to some sort of certain, enforceable conclusion about what the person one is killing 'deserves'. (Again, in the Silmarillion we see that if somebody were to have just up and killed Maedhros and Maglor after the first couple rounds of Kinslaying, which they would have richly 'deserved' by most metrics, things would actually not have gone so well towards the end of the story! Elwing would have had no reason to throw herself into the sea, et cetera.)

tl;dr what Gandalf is saying is basically, as Tony Abbott might put it, that nobody, not even Gandalf himself, is the suppository of all wisdom, and that only somebody who was would be qualified to say whether or not killing somebody would be altogether 'just'. In Tolkien's worldview, this is nobody but God. In the worldviews of most forumites, it'd be either nobody but God or nobody at all.

From "Capital punishment in Pennsylvania" to "Lord of the Rings Literary Analysis" in two pages is also a very impressive derail

[Bacon King]

Sorry for responding to something in one of the post galleries/mines but

Over 750,000 refugees have been resettled in the United States in the past 14 years; not one has been charged as a domestic terrorist; the United States has one of the most strict and extensive vetting process in the world for refugees entering the United States. The refugees fleeing Syria are escaping ISIL, and forcing them to stay in Syria only emboldens them. To close our borders to these people because of a terrorist attack committed in France by French nationals is immoral, prejudiced, and wrong.

He didn't mention the fact that the French nationals involved in the Paris attacks ultimately had roots in Muslim countries (or, in the case of one of them, partial roots; with his mother being Portuguese),

Even if you ignore the fact that it would be ridiculous and racist for our refugee and immigration policies to discriminate against an entire religion of one billion people just because of the actions of a handful of people, it's frankly absurd for you to imply that we should treat our own citizens any differently on account of their religious beliefs. Fortunately, our founding fathers envisioned that there might one day be people as absurdly bigoted as you, so they wrote the First Amendment to prohibit religious discrimination

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The Syrian passport was probably fraudulent. The refugee in question went very far out of his way to properly get his passport stamped in two different European countries at a time when the German government announced that the European customs enforcement was so incredibly overloaded that even the few refugees who agreed to be properly registered with them found it nearly impossibly to do so at all. This (probably fake) passport that was registered as a refugee's in both Greece and Serbia (despite the incredibly difficulty it would take to do so in either place, let alone the redundancy of doing it twice) managed to remain completely intact after the person holding it detonated a suicide bomb they were carrying. The only realistic possibility here is that the terrorist got a fake passport, got himself recorded as a Syrian refugee with it, then placed it on his body during his terrorist act in such a way that it would survive to be found once he died. ISIS wants Europe to close its doors to refugees - they hate the idea of Muslims living in Christian lands, and they want these Muslims to hate the West so they can potentially be recruited as footsoldiers and terrorists.

Or, of course, we could assume that the terrorist went through the proper bureaucratic channels when entering Europe just because he was a law abiding citizen, and he kept his passport on him while he was slaughtering innocents because hey maybe he might need to catch an international flight after he's done detonating a suicide bomb in a crowded stadium you never know

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Hello yes I am denying your assertion and I see no credible evidence supporting it. As the Paris attacks demonstrate, ISIS has lots of supporters in Europe already and the bigger problem for them is getting those European terrorists to travel to Syria, not the other way around.

Taking like a million refugees hoping to reach a new life in Europe, and leaving them to die in a war zone because of our own intolerance? Yeah I'm sure that won't drive anyone to ideological extremes or compel anyone to take up arms against us nope no way

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yeah and if the United States hadn't been so liberal in allowing immigration we wouldn't have had to deal with so many Japanese saboteurs during World War Two

oh wait

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I don't think it'd be too smart of an idea to flood hundreds of thousands of disaffected refugees into the homeland of radical Wahhabism that produced Bin Laden most of the 9/11 hijackers

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Props to you for this at least

[Bacon King]

who is fighting against capitalism in all seriousness these days?

seems outdated.

Young people who have never known anything but what appears to be a severely ineffective system where industries are allowed to consolidate and amass power unfettered. Where businesses are increasingly free to bribe politicians for all sorts of benefits. Where the pharmaceutical industry has become so powerful that they casually engage in extreme price gouging to the detriment of society. Where the fossil fuel industry continues to wreck the earth for short term profits. Where the banking sector crashes the economy, gets bailed out and gets off with a mere slap on the wrist. Where wages and benefits have stagnated while COL rises, and the wealthy increasingly take bigger pieces of the pie. All while many pro-market politicians deny citizens any programs or benefits to alleviate some of this burden, under the excuse that the market will take care of it (lol). And on, and on and on....

And sure as hell doesn't help that the loudest proponents of the free market come from a political party whose economic philosophy of deregulation and giant tax breaks for the wealthy/corporations is at times almost indistinguishable from special interest corruption.

Proponents of capitalism have really failed to make the case to young people of why their system is the best. It doesn't mean capitalism shouldn't be practiced - it just means, imo, that the GOP's idea of it should be killed with fire. Unfortunately, because of the unwillingness to reign in the huge excesses of this failed system, they are helping to create a large amount of people who are far more open to a completely different ideas.

I think well-regulated markets with generous social programs is the way to go, but I don't blame others for completely losing faith in capitalism.