I like it! But I must have missed the campaign speech when Ms. Clinton said that.
Oh…
The one about the bitter clingers….
But wait… Obama was a constitutional law professor. Apparently he referenced the communist manifesto.
My preference is English and Greek. “Shall not” “Molon labe”.
O’Bummer’s 57 state quote was quite enlightening …
Obama was a guest lecturer and never a professor.
Her call for “Australian Style Gun Control” was Part 1
Calls for censoring the “Alt-Right” and Foxnews was Part 2
Already been done. Look at the calls for ‘equal time’ for progressive radio shows and such that can’t support themselves with advertising like everything else. Got an idea so bad no one wants to hear about it? If your a statist, the next step is to have government mandate people listen. Fake News? Just a cover for ‘news we don’t like’. Political correctness is the ultimate expression of censorship. Don’t be fooled, the left has been calling for censorship for a long time, they are just weak enough for the time being that they must couch it in more palatable rhetoric or confine themselves to issues few are paying attention to. Given more power, progressives would dictate what can be expressed, to the exclusion of all other expression.
So it’s always been for inherently flawed ideas, they hate competition, because they arent competitive.
So true. Look at the Democratic presidential candidate selection process, with its “super delegates.” No competition, just coronation. Which, in the last election, is just as well.
how many coin flips?
@RF, I’ve been a republican super delegate, the coronation process is no different.
Sure, Stalin was a demonic beast from hell, but…#datunderfolderdoh
That was my first though also. I have an underfolder obsession. I have 1 milled bulgy, 1 hungarian, 1 polish, and I’m converting my troll AK74 in 300blk to an underfolder. I still need a yugo underfolder kit.
Do you wrap your underfolders with a bandage/tourniquet as was often seen with AK-74 side-folders in Afghanistan? I’ve fired a couple, and the bare metal often slams into my cheekbone and rips out some beard hairs. Never once had a pleasant experience firing one.
I put nothing on my underfolders as it makes them no longer fold. I don’t have a beard so I wouldn’t know about it pulling my facial hair out. I don’t have any issues with firing the rifle. I’ve used my milled bulgy in in a tactical style 3 gun competition. I built the rifle from a CNC Warrior receiver and used a milled kit I got the Sportsman guide a few years ago. I had no issues with it slapping me in the face or engaging targets while pulling a sled with a dummy in it. That was a smoker!
In russia, trigger fingers you.
Yes.
Stalin was a bureaucratic paper pusher who had anyone he didn’t like killed until he ruled the USSR. Something we should fear here in the US.
Stalin was anything but a bureaucratic paper pusher. He made his bones in the Communist party by engaging in criminal activities to acquire funds to support the party. He actively participated in military actions (sometimes atrocities) in the Russian civil war.
From his early youth Stalin was involved in criminal enterprises including kidnapping, rape, pedophelia and murder. He was a criminal sociopath with no regard for anyone else other than their value to get for Stalin what Stalin wanted.
He was as far from a paper-pushing bureaucrat as any opportunistic gangster could possibly be.
Quote: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are just a statistic.” – Josef Stalin
Indeed. There is often a debate among historians of who was the worst person in all of history, usually coming down to Stalin or Hitler. For the most part, Stalin seems to edge out Hitler in that category.
Hitler believed he was right, and considering how the European nations handled the settlement of WW1, he was to a degree. The Europeans created the conditions which created Hitler. The majority of Germans were pro Hitler and were willing to follow him into hell.
Stalin made himself right by eliminating the opposition using brute force on his own people.
Ideas typically require guns or violent action/threat of violent action to be implemented.
Ideas being more powerful is a nice thought but unless the ideas arm up they’ll be beaten down every time. Say some glorious idea does takes over if that idea doesn’t arm to protect itself another idea will eventually come along that is armed and take out the previous glorious idea. Is a prevailing idea always good? Communism, fascism, theocracies. Shitty ideas become popular all the time.
You can have your ideas and I’ll keep the guns.
Tell me how ideas didn’t defeat guns in colonial India.
Good point, so the score is Ideas: 1 Guns: 1 million
You’re forgetting all of Eastern Europe, Brazil, and most of the former U.S.S.R.
You’re forgetting the rest of the English speaking parts of the British Empire. Or was I absent from school the day they taught about the great Canadian, Australian, New Zealand Revolutionary Wars?
Yes, there may have been some incidental violence along the way in some of these places. Some riots here, a beating or two there, but as for a traditional, U.S. style war of independence? Nope, just ideas.
Your “ideas” only work against governments who have some level of decency. Try those same tactics against Nazi Germany.
How lovey dovey would you rate Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu?
Not ideas alone. It wasn’t all Ghandi and hunger strikes. The Indian Independence Movement had been hammering away at the British with violence for decades. Ghandi’s peacenik schtick only came in at the end and while he was hunger striking militants were raiding British forces.
History just really wants you to think love and hugs will liberate you so you’ll stop resisting with any effective means.
Beat me to it. So many “bloodless revolutions” have only come after or alongside violence and the continued call for violence. The non violent protests become an acceptable option to the threat of the alternative. It goes to the old argument in this nation that without Malcolm X, there could be no MLK. Johnson certainly believed as much.
History is neutral…it is what it is so to speak. It’s the various modern day, soft, feel-good interpretation of history that wants you to think love and hugs conquer all.
Pretty much this shire-man. The economic and geopolitical realities following the second world war; General repartitioning, whole sale loss of colonies, and a greater dependency by England on the US, who had no love or desire for colonies or colonial mastery, a shifting zeitgeist, massive debt, and the promise of a prolonged, intractable anti-colonial guerrilla war with a far away place that by away all rights ought to be its own nation, vastly more populous than the remainder of the UK, doubtful help from the commonwealth….
Ghandi might get the glamour, but Indian independence had been largely decided by enormous events that had nothing to do with him.
Massive war debt, war fatigue at home, a legitimate lack of resources and man power, highly doubtful help or even withdraw of support by the US and commonwealth, shifting attitudes at home attitudes and abroad…and the specter of a costly, unpopular and ultimately unwinnable war gained the Indians their independance.
That last is really important though, if India and Indians had seemed docile in the colonial arrangement, independence might have been another generation or more in coming.
Consider Ghandi the propaganda arm of the Indian independence movement. Important, sure, and loud and obvious, but hardly the whole picture.
The Hindus and Muslims did more killing of each other than they did of the British.
They probably killed 1000 times as many Indians as the British did.
Jwtaylor? MLK was leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott back when Macolm X was nothing but a recently paroled convict.
MLK later founded the influential SCLC while X was just a minister at a Boston mosque. MLK led the Birmingham Campaign and (in conjunction with several other major civil rights groups) the March on Washington. Along the way he earned Time magazine’s Man of the Year honor and taking home the Nobel Peace Prize. X was just running around shooting his mouth off in media interviews and college campus speeches.
Now, I will grant that X led 1963’s so-called “Unity Ralley” in Harlem. In my reading, it was one of the largest civil rights events of the era. True, that event did precede the D.C. March by a couple of months. Still, aside from right just now, who’s ever heard of it? What did it accomplish?
It was MLK who gave black civil rights respectability, through nonviolence, charisma, grand ideas, and a prestigious doctor title (albeit perhaps earned in part via an allegedly, partially plagarized dissertation). It was MLK whose work paved the way for X. Without MLK, X would have been just another loudmouth fringe character. X didn’t actually lead any military campaign in battle.
Jonathan Houston, the argument is not that he would have not lived, but that he would not have been effective . President Johnson admitted that it was his fear of the black uprising that prompted him to align himself with Kings’ movement.
India actually went to war very soon after independence with Pakistan, and has been fighting Pakistan on and off… really about ever since then. Ideas alone may have saved them from the civilized British, but they’ll always lose against an enemy that sees you as subhuman. Imagine trying to protest against the taliban or ISIS. Think about how that would end.
In the movie Ghandi there is a scene in which a train is derailed or overturned. What viewers are not told is that the train was attacked by armed guerillas.
“Ideas typically require guns or violent action/threat of violent action to be implemented.”
In the strictest sense, true.
However, where government is concerned, every idea they implement has force behind it.
But gun control, as an idea, is couched in terms that don’t require force, just deceit and dishonesty, and outright lies. Ideas, by themselves, can be extremely powerful, and result in legislation that has force behind it, while no force is required to make that legislation.
Thus, gun control (like many leftist ideas) doesn’t require force to become law, which is the implementation of the idea.
Ideas are, indeed, more powerful than force.
Take what’s happening on many college campuses across the US; actual segregated graduations, demanded by minorities! Brought about by ideas implanted by SJWs masquerading as educators. No force required to get blacks to demand segregation.
No, ideas don’t require force at all; all they require are people willing to believe the ideas in question.
This is exactly the far left mindset: you can’t have your own ideas; you must accept theirs. Any non acceptance of their ideas and they try to shame and threaten you. It’s no wonder the far left is rabidly anti-gun. Power is nothing without control.
If the idea is ‘good’, in this sense meaning workable, however flawed or evil it may also be, then it must also have in it the stuff that will make it work, meaning in this sense either arms, or such popular uprising that force of arms fails to contain it, or no such force is brought to bear on it.
For the statist, ideas are ‘good’ if they support the state, even if implementation requires force of arms.
For the theocrat, ideas are ‘good’ if they support the religion, even if implementation requires force of arms.
I should hope for the rest of us, ideas can be ‘good’ and not necessarily require forceful implementation.
That said, really good ideas tend to natively contain either the seeds of their own implementation, or self evident truths, that once revealed cannot be ignored.
Really good ideas may require the defense of arms to avoid being snuffed out before implementation, but seldom require direct force of arms for implementation.
NEVER FORGET
Stalin was just somebody’s A-HOLE neighbor who needed a job. Nowhere on this planet has mankind ever been ruled by aliens, animals or robots. All of the world’s worst a-holes have only been PEOPLE, they eat, they breath, they sh_t, and THEY SLEEP SOMEWHERE.
Tolerate “Stalin’s” at your peril. Safer to do the whole FING village.
Communism is a fV<K fV<K game that should be tolerated naught, nil, zero zilch, nein, and stamped out wherever you find it.
Like California.
I’m with you on this one Joe, the only good commie is one that’s dead. I’m all for the open marketplace of ideas, but I’m severely against agitating to force those ideas on others, and communism, at its root, is a statist philosophy, dependent on force not only in its defense, but in its implementation.
You can fight for your own liberty, but you can’t fight for your own communism.
It may seem radical to say, but McCarthy didn’t go anywhere near far enough.
It’s hard to square the BOR with ‘death to commies’, but those bits of the larger document about security from threats foreign and domestic…communism is anathema to liberty where ever it is found, and must be stamped out ruthlessly anywhere it appears.
Sharia holds a similar place in the pantheon of ideas, antithetical to basic rights and liberties, inherently and obviously evil in its effects, and fit only to be shunned, scorned, and stamped out where ever found.
The duplicity, hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that is so endemic on the left is necessary to their ideology : The reality is that all ideas are not equal, and there is no legitimate defense to this found anywhere in relativism. Some ideas are self evidently bad, and must not be tried. If this is so, progressivism is doomed, and properly belongs alongside fascism, communism and sharia. Obviously the left cannot admit to this, and thus must perpetually obfuscate to conceal the deleterious effects their ideas would have if implemented.
So I say that you may judge others by their ideas and for their ideas. In fact, this is the most righteous and lofty means of discriminating among friends and enemies. I also say that it is perfectly right to agitate for the destruction of that and those who would enslave you.
Our system of governance, however flawed, seeks to balance the rights of the few with the rights of the many, and to permit liberty where ever practicable. To the degree that an idea advances this, or is compatible with it, the idea is ‘good’. At the other end of the spectrum is evil, for if evil effects are desirous, regardless of intent, is not the idea itself also evil? Evil has only one solution. What would violate the social contract also removes itself from the protections of same. Thus, death to communists, fascists of all stripes, including those founded or masked in the trappings of theocracy, and keep an eye on those progressives… maybe both eyes: communism by any other name, would it still oppress so many so much?
Wow. Ardent, you sound like any classic marxist/communist with it’s spawn of liberal/progressives and if we need to commit mass murder to protect against those with “evil” ideas or beliefs, well “the ends justify the means”, only you are arguing for “our” side.
Evil is as evil does, no matter which side you’re arguing for.
Incorrect. All ideas under the sun are welcome, EXCEPT those whose only purpose is to shit on everyone else. Communism is just that.
Better dead than red.
No kroglinepie. Not if the idea being proposed use the same methods as Communists. Then there is no difference.
When the peasants get “ideas” they want to change things, when they get guns they can.
The actual translated quote is “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?” There’s no question that Stalin viewed many of his own people as enemies, but the complete quote does have a somewhat different message behind it.
What a great image of Stalin. In RL, he was a 5’6″ toad of a man with a withered arm, but in that picture he’s Ramboski.
Right? First thing I though of is, “man, who is that artist and does he still do portraits? “
If you were a soviet painting a portrait of Stalin for Stalin, how would you depict him? The value of most artists work increases on their death, but this only works if your still have a body of work in existence, and you aren’t a nonperson.
I’m frankly surprised there isn’t a beautiful woman on his arm and a halo around his head.
Stalin must have requested something understated.
This is exactly what I tell everyone who advocates for gun control.
Funny thing happens every time though they never understand, they always respond with freedom of speech (press, religion, etc) is protected by the constitution.
It almost seems like they don’t listen to the very words coming out of their mouth
Very common occurrence on this board, gun owners are no exception to this programmed social conditioning when it comes to attacking other crucial rights.
Which other amendments do people here advocate stripping away from others?
Most people only want their agenda supported for their own benefit, that’s just human nature. There’s a difference though between calling everything you want given to you for free a “right” and actual rights to things needed to live and prosper by your own work.
Duke, amendments don’t give rights. At the same time, we have watched in silent compliance as the 1st and the 4th have been reduced to comic book status.
Up here in Canada, where you need a license to own a firearm, it gets me to thinking about voting. I mean, we only let someone possess a firearm with special rules around it, but any idiot with a pulse can vote. In this system, firearms are considered uniquely dangerous and important, and therefore “ownership” is strictly controlled.
I wonder if the average Canadian voter has considered the implications of that.
(note that this also applies in other nations, as well as a number of US states).
In a stable, functioning democracy, votes are far more powerful and dangerous than guns. Here in the US the founders indented only free, white, male landowners to vote.
They were classist racist, and sexist no doubt! But what they were trying to ensure was that only those who were educated and vested in the outcomes could impact those outcomes. Clearly this is no longer the case here, as we dismissed classism, racism, and sexism, and rightly so. However we also, accidentally I believe, or perhaps for want of other means, dismissed any requirement or certitude that the electorate be either vested or educated. This will eventually be our downfall: Mindless mobs, paying no taxes and having neither understanding nor interest, voting themselves the benefits of the public treasury, until either the producers revolt and assert power, or flee, and all comes crashing down for lack of funds like every other experiment in unrestricted socialism.
In a democracy, guns only prove their political utility when it is no longer stable or functioning.
Funny coincidence those who agitate to destabilize the Republic also seek to restrict the possession of arms. I mean, it is just a coincidence, right?
Him and his minions won ww2. He was babtized so dont talk too much smack bout him or he will kick your ass in christian heaven along with hitler…
Oh please spare me the revisionist re-writing of history! You are either a supremely ignorant individual, or you are a bald faced liar.
Stalin was a communist, which bases it belief system on a very loud and vociferous denial of the existence of G-d as an “opiate of the masses”. And he murderously enforced that belief against Christians and it’s priests. Along with 50 million other fellow Russians. Along with godless Mao with his 80 million Chinese, and godless Pol-pot with his “paltry” 2 or 3 million.
Hitler was a Nazi, slang in German for National Socialist. And his primary logo was a symbol from an Eastern religious belief system.
You can continue to paint Christianity as some type of murderous belief system; but the reality is that while it has been used by power mad tyrants to rally the “useful idiots” (per Stalin) ,to impose control and commit mass murder in the past, it is the current “useful idiot atheists” rallied by the current power mad tyrants that have committed hundreds of millions deaths, all in the name of the demi-god called the state, in the last hundred years.
History will look back on the current crop of those claiming no belief in God as the greatest mass murderers in all of history, and as especially evil, because of thier defense of the tens of millions murdered of the most vulnerable and helpless among us, (otherwise known as unborn babies), as a “right”.
A prevailing view among Christians is that those aborted babies never reached the so-called “age of accountabilty” so in spite of their Adamic nature their entrance into Heaven is a forgone conclusion.
You may grieve about their death by abortion but allegedly ….they won’t.
“Prevailing”?, as in 1%, 10%, 50% 99.9%? What I have seen, is that for the majority of if not greater, as in better than 50% of Christians, believe that life begins at conception.
READ !!! Nothing in my post said anything about when life begins. I was discussing only the destination of the souls of the aborted babies, ie their deaths.
Tell me, where do the souls of the aborted babies end up ?
True. I didn’t read it correctly. Of course the souls of the unborn are a line straight to heaven. But what is your point? That it is a good thing that so many children being murdered are going to heaven? Sorry, I know that isn’t your point.But the judgement of a people and a culture that would make such an abomination not just legal, but a “right” will be severe!
What is my point ? Are you kidding ?
“What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but LOSES HIS SOUL ?”
What is the conversion rate ( saving souls from eternal torture ) of the most persuasive evangelist against an abortion doctor ? Only one man can claim a 100% succes rate. Guess which one ?
Even atheist Christopher Hitchens was against abortion and considered it immoral
but if Christian themselves believe saving a soul from Hell is the ultimate and overriding priority of human life then abortion is adding MILLIONS and MIILLIONS of people into Heaven who would likely consider being aborted a small price to pay for the pleasure of not being burned alive for eternity.
That is my point.
WOW! You are saying abortion is a good thing!
PDW, if you can’t see the inherent evil of ending a life, before it even had to chance to experience it outside the womb, then you are lost in a darkness of evil, of which I cannot even comprehend. Too many would and do agree with you.
Come quickly Lord! And send the light of your love to those capable of receiving it.
Are you insane ? I never said whether abortion was good or bad. At all. Ever. I don’t BELIEVE IN SOULS.
I simply commented on the relationship between the ridiculous belief in souls, eternal judgement, and your opinion that the millions of victims of abortion automatically go to heaven. Heaven is better than Hell….right ?
You’re only slightly less crazy than those other weirdos who go around blowing themselves up because their God told them to……
I see. I believe in the sanctity of life, even the life of an unborn baby, and that makes me “insane” and places me in the same realm as a jihadist that will blow himself and a bunch of innocent men, women and children to bloody bits. Riiight.
I stand by what I said PDW.
Dude you are REALLY ignorant. It’s true the soviets did most of the fighting and dying in WW2. However the soviets never would’ve won without support from the US and Britain, AND the US opening up against Japan, to prevent Japan from opening up a second front on Russia. People have forgotten the numerous metric tonnes of medical supplies, food, weapons, ammo, tanks, and planes we gave the USSR before they could get their factories back up and running. Most of the Soviets manufacturing base was captured by the Nazis in the first few months of the war, as they steam rolled to Moscow. People forget how fast the vermacht went from Poland to the gates of Moscow. We’re all very lucky the soviets managed to survive the first year of that war to come back bigger and badder then they ever were.
So what is your point Hank? Stalin still killed millions of Russians before the war, during the war and after. He starved millions to death in the Ukraine while collectivizing the farms. Stalin was a monster, even if he was key in defeating Hitler.
Can you read? My post was all about describing how important AMERICA’S effort in the war was.
Hideous crimes against humanity aside, that is a kick ass image. I need a painting like that of myself.
An awful lot of Clinton folks have had odd endings.
They are a watered down version of Stalin.
Slick’s nads weren’t big enough, Hillary’s certainly are.
I can easily see Hillary calling a MOAB strike on a Conservative subdivison or enclave.
For all of the Putin admirers out there know that;
1) Vladimir wants to change the city name Volgograd back to Stalingrad
2) In Crimea and in eastern Ukraine where Russian troops have taken over, the Kremlin has ordered posters and statues of Stalin to be installed in key government office areas.
3) Stalin murdered between 8,000,000 – 12,000,000 Ukrainians from 1932-33 in the largest genocide by famine known as the Holodomor.
4) Something RT “News” will never tell you: Ukrainians fought Russian Communist troops AND German troops during WW2 and four of the leaders of the Ukrainian resistance were not only surgical doctors but were Jewish. Over 2,000,000 Ukrainians died at the hands of the NAZIs who called them subhuman. Remember, the victors write the history.
5) Tens of thousands of the Soviet troops, who fought the NAZIs in Ukraine, who Putin “honors” on May Day were Ukrainian captives who were sent in front of the advancing Russia comminust troops and were mostley unarmed and old to pick up guns they find – if they turned around, they were shot by the Russian army.
6) Putin celebrates May Day with yellow and red communist flags and banners bearing the hammer & sickle AND banners of Stalin
7) Putin has stated that he does not intend to expand Russian gun ownership which includes a 5-year wait to buy any long-arm with rifled barrel (shotguns can be bought as soon as your license is approved). Handguns are outlawed and the only ones which are legal shoot hard rubber bullets. Dmitry Medvedev (Prime Minister) stated that he would like to make the gun laws even more restrictive.
Now you may know why Ukrainians are fighting and many are for a free Ukraine and don’t want the totalitarian EU either. By the way, in Ukraine, although handguns are extremely restricted, one can buy any MSR with any size magazine. Here is Ukraine’s Gander Mountain https://ibis.net.ua/en/products/poluavtomaticheskoe/ See Ukrainian Freedom Fighters of WW2 documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXYyY6lBeUM
I went to a gun store in Kiev. It had some one resting stuff in there. But, if you want a handgun, you go to the bazaar. It’s not legal, but a lot of people buy them anyway.
M1Lou, Thanks for the info! What type of handguns are commonly sold at the bazaar and at what kind of prices? Did they have ammo as well? Pistol ammo is hard to get unless you are licensed as a gun shop or manufacturer and all of the pistol caliber carbines for civilian sale (HK94 type, Cx4, MP-40, etc.) are in 9x21mm.
I’m not sure what they are selling as I never went to find out. I would suspect it’s going to be a lot of stuff like revolvers, Tokarevs and Maks. Some of my wife’s friends have handguns and that is where they purchased them.
You are correct but I believe the whole premise behind changing the name back to Stalingrad is a symbolic homage to the will of the Russian people. Sure, it does bear “the name of the boss”, but it also represented Russia’s most dire hour, and the biggest turning point in Russian and infact world history. To the Russians the city isn’t symbolic of Stalin, but of the astounding victory there. It wasn’t just another battle to them. I don’t even think there is an American battle in history that could be it’s parallel to us. I’d say the closest battle you could compare it to would be the Battle of Britain for the British. Perhaps you could compare it to early days of our revolution when Washington pulled off some miraculous victories as the existence of the United States teetered on the brink.
” I don’t even think there is an American battle in history that could be it’s parallel to us.”
That battle was called ‘Gettysburg’…
Perhaps, but Stalingrad was absolutely enormous, with as many people in hours as the whole battle of Gettysburg. That’s not to detract from its importance in our history, but after Stalingrad WW2 wasn’t the same war. The Germans never revcovered. They lost an entire Army Group. Had the Germans won, Russia wouldve effectively been knocked out of the war and it would’ve only been the US and Britain facing the vermacht at its height. That would’ve been well before we had any kind of air superiority.
Yep. India means NOTHING. The Brits lost their empire and not just India. We kicked them out in 1781 by force of arms(with armed help). Even Christianity didn’t truly take hold until Roman emperor Constantine went to war with the cross as his standard(for good and bad)…
Like most theocracies, Christianity is restrictive of liberty, capricious, and evil in its effect. It’s no wonder it required force of arms to ‘catch on’. Most evil ideas do. I’ve yet to understand why such things aren’t self limiting. Defense of an idea by arms is one thing, but implementation by force of arms is a good warning sign that the idea is evil. I doubt many people advocate for forcing ideas they believe to be evil on others, but they so often miss the warning signs of a bad idea: unpopular, requires force to implement, needlessly restricts liberty, has no internal mechanism for adaptation or change, is rooted in utopian and unrealistic ideology…Christianity meets virtually all the criteria, including violent exclusivity…and, this is telling, is founded on a death cult. Politically, the primary difference between Judaism, Islam and Christianity is that it has been a very long time since Judaism had the following necessary to violently force itself on others. Make no mistake though, no religion is more than a single or few fanatics and the right events to seize upon from attempting to become a theocracy, and theocracies are inherently evil.
It’s true. Everywhere Christianity has been implemented, there has been mass murder, and a mass Exodus of people trying to escaped the madness and the mass death, to the point where the Christian governments have had to build walls to keep people in, and would kill anyone trying to leave.
Oh, wait, that was communist Russia, and China, and Pol-pot Cambodia, and Vietnam after we left, and Castro Cuba where people were desperate to escape these godless “Utopias” and were killed for trying to leave.
It has been the Hallmark of Christian countries like the USA and much of the recent history of Christian Western Europe of having incredible freedom, civil rights and economic opportunity and it was the west that has been the end point of people from around the world trying to escape tyranny, oppression and mass death.
Did history begin in the 20th century, and since when is the US a christian nation?
No doubt communists have killed more people, but as a defense, it’s rather like saying Jeffery Dahmer is wonderful since he killed so many fewer people than Gacy.
Minus the whole force of arms thing, Christianity would have passed out of history as an obscure death cult offshoot of Judaism.
Forcing ideas and capricious restrictions on liberty on others is wrong no matter what you call it. To the extent that it was forced on entire nations by force of arms it’s evil.
Christians and Communists are not different ‘people’ they have different ideas. Both are founded in absurd utopian dreams, both capriciously and self servingly restrict liberties and both have behaved horribly at times. Both seek to ‘otherize’ non converts, and both claim exclusive rights to the truth. Both have subjugated and murdered as an open matter of course.
Just because it gores YOUR sacred cow doesn’t make it any less true.
Good ideas may need to defend themselves by force of arms, but good ideas never require force of arms for their implementaion, by merely continuing to exist they eventually win out.
Ardent, you sound some what an educated individual, so you should know America was initially founded by Christians escaping religious persecution. And that up through sixties, the greatest majority of Americans were listed as Christian in the census. And that even today, when asked what most Americans see them selves as atheist or believing in a higher power, 75% say they are various denominations of Christian. So yes, even today, America is a Christian country.
And world wide, Christianity is the largest body of people that believe in a certain religion, over a billion.
As for “otherizing” people, you and other atheists do that very well in painting Christians and other people of faith as horrible subhumans that deserve derision, denigration and insults. People like you, other atheists. have committed horrible acts of mass murder, and yes, as so called “Christians” , as well.
But the only “cult of death” that I see, are those promoted by atheists. Demographics is destiny. Atheists, as a group, do not have enough children to replace themselves. Only those groups with a strong religious and spiritual beliefs even come close to having enough children to maintain their population, let alone grow as a population.
Judaism, and Christianity have been around for over 6 thousand years, because they held marriage and children as sacred.
How many cultures based on atheism have been through history? What, none? Why? Because when the belief in no God becomes the norm, the culture is getting ready for a collapse.
You Ardent, and people like you, are the reason darkages happen. You, Ardent, and your beliefs, are the real “culture of death”
Christianity is the cult of life, truth and love. You Ardent and yours, are the real cult of death, destruction, and hate.
Ardent,
Forcing ideas and capricious restrictions on liberty on others is wrong no matter what you call it.
Please cite two or three specific examples of such “capricious restrictions on liberty”.
Until I hear from you, I will quote one often claimed example and its INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE CONSEQUENCES TO INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETY:
(1) The “liberty” to be sexually promiscuous and sexually active outside of traditional marriage. The DESTRUCTIVE consequences of this should be readily apparent … but no one ever mentions them:
— unwanted pregnancies
— rampant sexually transmitted diseases
— children in broken homes grow up with various psychological scars
— not enough children born to provide the next generation of LABOR to support the existing aging population.
I have rarely heard of anyone celebrating an unwanted pregnancy. Rather, such events have often been devastating to the mother, father, and extended families involved.
I have never heard anyone celebrate contracting a sexually transmitted disease. (And note that sexually transmitted diseases were quite often a death sentence until the last few decades.)
It is a known FACT that children who grow up without a loving and attentive mother AND father are FAR more likely to have psychological scars that haunt them throughout their adult life. And that is why I have never heard anyone celebrate NOT having a loving and attentive mother and father.
It is also a known FACT that homosexual sex and promiscuous sex with effective birth control do NOT produce children. The consequence of not producing children: there are no young people to do everything that you are eventually unable to do at some point as you age. I have never heard anyone celebrate being unable to move a new heavy piece of furniture into their home and be unable to find anyone else who can do it.
This one example of a “capricious” Christian restriction of “liberty” (banning homosexual sex and promiscuous sex) and the explanation that I included should make it abundantly clear that this “restriction” is anything but capricious or somehow evil. Rather, this “restriction” is for the actual preservation of society.
I could go on. I hope you get the point and will reconsider your thinking.
To be fair, most good ideas regarding liberty require force of arms to catch on too.
Any other day, we’re all in agreement that guns are inanimate objects, having no volition of their own. Today, we’re more divided on the ideas vs. guns debate than even on a hypothetical Yoda vs. Harry Potter matchup.
Guns are just a tool. They derive their vitality and value from the people wielding them, who in turn are driven by ideas.
I believe in this case that guns are a semantical stand in for ‘means of force’. Denying the means of force to this or that person or group is neither inherently good or bad, except for the ideas of the group, or more simply, what they would use the force to accomplish.
In a stable, functioning democracy, denial of the means of force ought to be suspect, since no force is needed to engender change, but may always be needed to maintain the democracy and the liberties it safeguards.
“Denying the means of force to this or that person or group is neither inherently good or bad”.
Ahh, Ardent. So your a relativist. The right right to keep and bear arms is not a G-d given right, so it is not “inherently good or bad” to deny this right, depending on whether the government, and those that happen to be in power, determine if a particular group in question has the “proper” ideas and beliefs.
Or am I wrong?
I disagree. I believe the powers that be of the time saw the writing on the wall. The old roman god’s were dying and dead and the new crop of primarily Gaulish pagan mmigrants with no history or appreciation for Roman history or tradition were replacing the shrinking population of native Romans. They saw the spreading popularity of Christianity and saw it as a threat to thier power. So they stepped in and appropriated and took control of this belief system, and then used it as simply another form of state power and control.
Which is why Hillary and the Democrats are so incensed with the Heller and Citizens United court decisions.
Better pack the court with Liberal judges to disarm and gag those “deplorables”.
Quote of the Day: The Second Amendment Protects The First
The Second Amendment is a TERM for ARMISTICE among SOCIETY.
Chuck it at your peril, AND IT BETTER FING LOOK LIKE YOU’RE HOLDING THE WHOLE DAMN THING UP BY YOURSELF RIGHT UP UNTIL THEN.
Stalin didn’t actually believe that first part, and this is classic double speak from him. The fact is that he pointed guns at anyone who had ideas that disagreed with his. Those people were either buried or disappeared into the Gulag and forgotten. Stalin was one of the masters, if not the master, of using guns to annihilate ideas that he disagreed with. He very much believed in the ultimate power of the gun.
Ideas are powerful, but the truly radical ones rarely get anywhere without guns. Many more are put to a violent end with guns. Stalin was a violent, authoritarian pig who was also afraid that contrary ideas might eventually bring Mussolini’s fate upon him. To that end he used guns to strip away every shred of freedom, autonomy, or dignity possessed by the people he ruled.
Become familiar with literature by and about tyrants like this as often as possible. Know your enemies, recognize their rhetoric. I’ve read some 2,500+ book pages on the history of the USSR and global KGB operations in recent years. The parallels to current SJW movements are eye-opening. Nobody ever got shot in the back by a tower guard for trying to leave a capitalist country.
To uncommon sense:
You are so right about the biblical template regarding parenting, the family unit and it’s effect upon the offspring.
A father and mother are good but children having a father and FOUR mothers is even better.
Jacob/ Israel produced the twelve tribes of Israel by having sex with :
A) Rachel and Leah who were sisters
B) they were also Jacob’s first cousins
C) Billah and Zilpah who were simply female servants with no legal status.
Jacob and his “family values” would fit right in with Ozark hill billies.
Oh PDW. You can hate all you want on an early tribal society and their different societal beliefs as to “appropriate” marriage customs, but you miss the salient point. Judaism, and it’s next evolution of Christianity, are still a very alive and vital belief system followed by over a billion people, 6 thousand years later. Can you say the same about a society based on atheism? Because atheism is not new. It always pops up at the end of every culture, before it collapses into chaos, and a new dark age. It is in fact the cause of the collapse as the culture turns from the inspired directions as to a living culture, and embraces the belief of no gods, and ends up embracing death as the culture dies a violent and bloody extinction.
Oh PDW. You can hate all you want on an early tribal society and their different societal beliefs as to “appropriate” marriage customs, but you miss the salient point. Judaism, and it’s next evolution of Christianity, are still a very alive and vital belief system followed by over a billion people, 6 thousand years later. Can you say the same about a society based on atheism? Because atheism is not new. It always pops up at the end of every culture, before it collapses into chaos, and a new dark age. It is in fact the cause of the collapse as the culture turns from the inspired directions as to a living culture, and embraces the belief of no god, and ends up embracing death as the culture dies a violent and bloody extinction.
The early tribal arrangements I referenced came with God’s approval ( the sister-wives Leah and Rachel’s prayers were answered in their jealous baby making competition ).
If God is the God of moral absolutes ….and he by his blessing of this polygamous marriage implicitly approves of multiple wives and concubines for Jacob…. then who are you to second guess his “perfect wisdom” ? Why do Christians abhor what God had already approved of ?
BTW, God approves “ripping up” pregnant women in Hosea 13:16. Death to both mother and child, it would seem ?
So PDW. I see you ignored my main point. Because you can’t rebut it. Show me the societies that are based on atheist beliefs, that are still in existence today. You can’t. They collapse into chaos, once the denial of a higher power becomes the norm.
I was thinking about your statement in another post that I am insane for believing in a higher power, that I believe that G-d created the universe, and all of it’s inhabitants, including human beings.
You see, to me, the bible is an inspired manual, a how to book, on building a viable and healthy growing culture. So based on history, and six thousand years of success, the proofs in the pudding. I practice a belief that works, That is demonstrably sane, because I am practicing a belief that builds a healthy, vibrant and growing culture. You, on the other, are actually the insane one. You base your guiding principles on something that has been shown through all of history, leads to the destruction of the culture that holds this belief, that there in no G-d. Russia being the most recent example of a culture very loudly and proudly was based on the ideas of man, and not on God. And it was nothing but mass blood and death and terror and absolute insanity, to the point where walls needed to be built to try to keep people in. We, though, as a still a primarily Christian country, need to build walls to keep people out. What does that say about our level of freedom, prosperity and opportunity that we built by G-ds guidance?
So I won’t do what you did and ignore the point you brought up. About polygamous marriage in the old testament. This is why the Christ came. He was bringing the next stage of human beings evolutionary spiritual growth. The New Testament. And in this next stage of growth, the marriage between one man and one woman was and is to be one of G-ds new covenants.
In the end, PDW, it really does not matter if you think I’m insane for believing in G-d, or if I think you are insane for NOT believing in G-d. Because in the end, the victor rights the history books. And from all of the six thousand years of the proof of the success of people like me believing in the one true G-d, and by his own word, the world will become The Christs footstool, and those that do not voluntarily bow to the supremacy of the one that sent him, will no longer find a place at his table.
What was it that someone said, “Insanity, or brilliance, is measured by the level of his failure or his success”. I guess we will find out which of us was insane, or brilliant(inspired) by who is left standing as the majority belief, when the final curtain falls.
The quote is actually “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?” It’s not a quote about subjugation of the Soviet people, but about keeping their enemies from fighting back.
Every quote you read on the internet is true. – Abraham Lincoln
“The Second Amendment Protects The First”
This should be a reminder to the marxist that are infesting our schools and colleges who try to take away our right to fee speech.
And specifically, this should be a reminder to the Antifa’s.
We don’t need permission from the State to exercise our right to defend our lives while we are exercising our right to free speech.
I glad we have a second amendment by those great Dead White godly Men, when people who support taking down confederate statues and also erect a statue of Joseph Stalin in Washington state!!!!
I’m also glad Christianity brought literacy to the western world. And ended slavery. The atheist of the French Revolution tried to make a utopia. Lenin wanted a utopian then Stalin, while Hitler was still in jail. All three were atheist.
Atheists have never believed in individual liberty. They are tyrants at their core. Historically they have never supported the Bill of Rights.
I like it! But I must have missed the campaign speech when Ms. Clinton said that.
Oh…
The one about the bitter clingers….
But wait… Obama was a constitutional law professor. Apparently he referenced the communist manifesto.
My preference is English and Greek. “Shall not” “Molon labe”.
O’Bummer’s 57 state quote was quite enlightening …
Obama was a guest lecturer and never a professor.
Her call for “Australian Style Gun Control” was Part 1
Calls for censoring the “Alt-Right” and Foxnews was Part 2
Already been done. Look at the calls for ‘equal time’ for progressive radio shows and such that can’t support themselves with advertising like everything else. Got an idea so bad no one wants to hear about it? If your a statist, the next step is to have government mandate people listen. Fake News? Just a cover for ‘news we don’t like’. Political correctness is the ultimate expression of censorship. Don’t be fooled, the left has been calling for censorship for a long time, they are just weak enough for the time being that they must couch it in more palatable rhetoric or confine themselves to issues few are paying attention to. Given more power, progressives would dictate what can be expressed, to the exclusion of all other expression.
So it’s always been for inherently flawed ideas, they hate competition, because they arent competitive.
So true. Look at the Democratic presidential candidate selection process, with its “super delegates.” No competition, just coronation. Which, in the last election, is just as well.
how many coin flips?
@RF, I’ve been a republican super delegate, the coronation process is no different.
Sure, Stalin was a demonic beast from hell, but…#datunderfolderdoh
That was my first though also. I have an underfolder obsession. I have 1 milled bulgy, 1 hungarian, 1 polish, and I’m converting my troll AK74 in 300blk to an underfolder. I still need a yugo underfolder kit.
Do you wrap your underfolders with a bandage/tourniquet as was often seen with AK-74 side-folders in Afghanistan? I’ve fired a couple, and the bare metal often slams into my cheekbone and rips out some beard hairs. Never once had a pleasant experience firing one.
I put nothing on my underfolders as it makes them no longer fold. I don’t have a beard so I wouldn’t know about it pulling my facial hair out. I don’t have any issues with firing the rifle. I’ve used my milled bulgy in in a tactical style 3 gun competition. I built the rifle from a CNC Warrior receiver and used a milled kit I got the Sportsman guide a few years ago. I had no issues with it slapping me in the face or engaging targets while pulling a sled with a dummy in it. That was a smoker!
In russia, trigger fingers you.
Yes.
Stalin was a bureaucratic paper pusher who had anyone he didn’t like killed until he ruled the USSR. Something we should fear here in the US.
Stalin was anything but a bureaucratic paper pusher. He made his bones in the Communist party by engaging in criminal activities to acquire funds to support the party. He actively participated in military actions (sometimes atrocities) in the Russian civil war.
From his early youth Stalin was involved in criminal enterprises including kidnapping, rape, pedophelia and murder. He was a criminal sociopath with no regard for anyone else other than their value to get for Stalin what Stalin wanted.
He was as far from a paper-pushing bureaucrat as any opportunistic gangster could possibly be.
Quote: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are just a statistic.” – Josef Stalin
Indeed. There is often a debate among historians of who was the worst person in all of history, usually coming down to Stalin or Hitler. For the most part, Stalin seems to edge out Hitler in that category.
Hitler believed he was right, and considering how the European nations handled the settlement of WW1, he was to a degree. The Europeans created the conditions which created Hitler. The majority of Germans were pro Hitler and were willing to follow him into hell.
Stalin made himself right by eliminating the opposition using brute force on his own people.
Ideas typically require guns or violent action/threat of violent action to be implemented.
Ideas being more powerful is a nice thought but unless the ideas arm up they’ll be beaten down every time. Say some glorious idea does takes over if that idea doesn’t arm to protect itself another idea will eventually come along that is armed and take out the previous glorious idea. Is a prevailing idea always good? Communism, fascism, theocracies. Shitty ideas become popular all the time.
You can have your ideas and I’ll keep the guns.
Tell me how ideas didn’t defeat guns in colonial India.
Good point, so the score is Ideas: 1 Guns: 1 million
You’re forgetting all of Eastern Europe, Brazil, and most of the former U.S.S.R.
You’re forgetting the rest of the English speaking parts of the British Empire. Or was I absent from school the day they taught about the great Canadian, Australian, New Zealand Revolutionary Wars?
Yes, there may have been some incidental violence along the way in some of these places. Some riots here, a beating or two there, but as for a traditional, U.S. style war of independence? Nope, just ideas.
Your “ideas” only work against governments who have some level of decency. Try those same tactics against Nazi Germany.
How lovey dovey would you rate Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu?
Not ideas alone. It wasn’t all Ghandi and hunger strikes. The Indian Independence Movement had been hammering away at the British with violence for decades. Ghandi’s peacenik schtick only came in at the end and while he was hunger striking militants were raiding British forces.
History just really wants you to think love and hugs will liberate you so you’ll stop resisting with any effective means.
Beat me to it. So many “bloodless revolutions” have only come after or alongside violence and the continued call for violence. The non violent protests become an acceptable option to the threat of the alternative. It goes to the old argument in this nation that without Malcolm X, there could be no MLK. Johnson certainly believed as much.
History is neutral…it is what it is so to speak. It’s the various modern day, soft, feel-good interpretation of history that wants you to think love and hugs conquer all.
Pretty much this shire-man. The economic and geopolitical realities following the second world war; General repartitioning, whole sale loss of colonies, and a greater dependency by England on the US, who had no love or desire for colonies or colonial mastery, a shifting zeitgeist, massive debt, and the promise of a prolonged, intractable anti-colonial guerrilla war with a far away place that by away all rights ought to be its own nation, vastly more populous than the remainder of the UK, doubtful help from the commonwealth….
Ghandi might get the glamour, but Indian independence had been largely decided by enormous events that had nothing to do with him.
Massive war debt, war fatigue at home, a legitimate lack of resources and man power, highly doubtful help or even withdraw of support by the US and commonwealth, shifting attitudes at home attitudes and abroad…and the specter of a costly, unpopular and ultimately unwinnable war gained the Indians their independance.
That last is really important though, if India and Indians had seemed docile in the colonial arrangement, independence might have been another generation or more in coming.
Consider Ghandi the propaganda arm of the Indian independence movement. Important, sure, and loud and obvious, but hardly the whole picture.
The Hindus and Muslims did more killing of each other than they did of the British.
They probably killed 1000 times as many Indians as the British did.
Jwtaylor? MLK was leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott back when Macolm X was nothing but a recently paroled convict.
MLK later founded the influential SCLC while X was just a minister at a Boston mosque. MLK led the Birmingham Campaign and (in conjunction with several other major civil rights groups) the March on Washington. Along the way he earned Time magazine’s Man of the Year honor and taking home the Nobel Peace Prize. X was just running around shooting his mouth off in media interviews and college campus speeches.
Now, I will grant that X led 1963’s so-called “Unity Ralley” in Harlem. In my reading, it was one of the largest civil rights events of the era. True, that event did precede the D.C. March by a couple of months. Still, aside from right just now, who’s ever heard of it? What did it accomplish?
It was MLK who gave black civil rights respectability, through nonviolence, charisma, grand ideas, and a prestigious doctor title (albeit perhaps earned in part via an allegedly, partially plagarized dissertation). It was MLK whose work paved the way for X. Without MLK, X would have been just another loudmouth fringe character. X didn’t actually lead any military campaign in battle.
Jonathan Houston, the argument is not that he would have not lived, but that he would not have been effective . President Johnson admitted that it was his fear of the black uprising that prompted him to align himself with Kings’ movement.
India actually went to war very soon after independence with Pakistan, and has been fighting Pakistan on and off… really about ever since then. Ideas alone may have saved them from the civilized British, but they’ll always lose against an enemy that sees you as subhuman. Imagine trying to protest against the taliban or ISIS. Think about how that would end.
In the movie Ghandi there is a scene in which a train is derailed or overturned. What viewers are not told is that the train was attacked by armed guerillas.
“Ideas typically require guns or violent action/threat of violent action to be implemented.”
In the strictest sense, true.
However, where government is concerned, every idea they implement has force behind it.
But gun control, as an idea, is couched in terms that don’t require force, just deceit and dishonesty, and outright lies. Ideas, by themselves, can be extremely powerful, and result in legislation that has force behind it, while no force is required to make that legislation.
Thus, gun control (like many leftist ideas) doesn’t require force to become law, which is the implementation of the idea.
Ideas are, indeed, more powerful than force.
Take what’s happening on many college campuses across the US; actual segregated graduations, demanded by minorities! Brought about by ideas implanted by SJWs masquerading as educators. No force required to get blacks to demand segregation.
No, ideas don’t require force at all; all they require are people willing to believe the ideas in question.
This is exactly the far left mindset: you can’t have your own ideas; you must accept theirs. Any non acceptance of their ideas and they try to shame and threaten you. It’s no wonder the far left is rabidly anti-gun. Power is nothing without control.
If the idea is ‘good’, in this sense meaning workable, however flawed or evil it may also be, then it must also have in it the stuff that will make it work, meaning in this sense either arms, or such popular uprising that force of arms fails to contain it, or no such force is brought to bear on it.
For the statist, ideas are ‘good’ if they support the state, even if implementation requires force of arms.
For the theocrat, ideas are ‘good’ if they support the religion, even if implementation requires force of arms.
I should hope for the rest of us, ideas can be ‘good’ and not necessarily require forceful implementation.
That said, really good ideas tend to natively contain either the seeds of their own implementation, or self evident truths, that once revealed cannot be ignored.
Really good ideas may require the defense of arms to avoid being snuffed out before implementation, but seldom require direct force of arms for implementation.
NEVER FORGET
Stalin was just somebody’s A-HOLE neighbor who needed a job. Nowhere on this planet has mankind ever been ruled by aliens, animals or robots. All of the world’s worst a-holes have only been PEOPLE, they eat, they breath, they sh_t, and THEY SLEEP SOMEWHERE.
Tolerate “Stalin’s” at your peril. Safer to do the whole FING village.
Communism is a fV<K fV<K game that should be tolerated naught, nil, zero zilch, nein, and stamped out wherever you find it.
Like California.
I’m with you on this one Joe, the only good commie is one that’s dead. I’m all for the open marketplace of ideas, but I’m severely against agitating to force those ideas on others, and communism, at its root, is a statist philosophy, dependent on force not only in its defense, but in its implementation.
You can fight for your own liberty, but you can’t fight for your own communism.
It may seem radical to say, but McCarthy didn’t go anywhere near far enough.
It’s hard to square the BOR with ‘death to commies’, but those bits of the larger document about security from threats foreign and domestic…communism is anathema to liberty where ever it is found, and must be stamped out ruthlessly anywhere it appears.
Sharia holds a similar place in the pantheon of ideas, antithetical to basic rights and liberties, inherently and obviously evil in its effects, and fit only to be shunned, scorned, and stamped out where ever found.
The duplicity, hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that is so endemic on the left is necessary to their ideology : The reality is that all ideas are not equal, and there is no legitimate defense to this found anywhere in relativism. Some ideas are self evidently bad, and must not be tried. If this is so, progressivism is doomed, and properly belongs alongside fascism, communism and sharia. Obviously the left cannot admit to this, and thus must perpetually obfuscate to conceal the deleterious effects their ideas would have if implemented.
So I say that you may judge others by their ideas and for their ideas. In fact, this is the most righteous and lofty means of discriminating among friends and enemies. I also say that it is perfectly right to agitate for the destruction of that and those who would enslave you.
Our system of governance, however flawed, seeks to balance the rights of the few with the rights of the many, and to permit liberty where ever practicable. To the degree that an idea advances this, or is compatible with it, the idea is ‘good’. At the other end of the spectrum is evil, for if evil effects are desirous, regardless of intent, is not the idea itself also evil? Evil has only one solution. What would violate the social contract also removes itself from the protections of same. Thus, death to communists, fascists of all stripes, including those founded or masked in the trappings of theocracy, and keep an eye on those progressives… maybe both eyes: communism by any other name, would it still oppress so many so much?
Wow. Ardent, you sound like any classic marxist/communist with it’s spawn of liberal/progressives and if we need to commit mass murder to protect against those with “evil” ideas or beliefs, well “the ends justify the means”, only you are arguing for “our” side.
Evil is as evil does, no matter which side you’re arguing for.
Incorrect. All ideas under the sun are welcome, EXCEPT those whose only purpose is to shit on everyone else. Communism is just that.
Better dead than red.
No kroglinepie. Not if the idea being proposed use the same methods as Communists. Then there is no difference.
When the peasants get “ideas” they want to change things, when they get guns they can.
The actual translated quote is “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?” There’s no question that Stalin viewed many of his own people as enemies, but the complete quote does have a somewhat different message behind it.
What a great image of Stalin. In RL, he was a 5’6″ toad of a man with a withered arm, but in that picture he’s Ramboski.
Right? First thing I though of is, “man, who is that artist and does he still do portraits? “
If you were a soviet painting a portrait of Stalin for Stalin, how would you depict him? The value of most artists work increases on their death, but this only works if your still have a body of work in existence, and you aren’t a nonperson.
I’m frankly surprised there isn’t a beautiful woman on his arm and a halo around his head.
Stalin must have requested something understated.
This is exactly what I tell everyone who advocates for gun control.
Funny thing happens every time though they never understand, they always respond with freedom of speech (press, religion, etc) is protected by the constitution.
It almost seems like they don’t listen to the very words coming out of their mouth
Very common occurrence on this board, gun owners are no exception to this programmed social conditioning when it comes to attacking other crucial rights.
Which other amendments do people here advocate stripping away from others?
Most people only want their agenda supported for their own benefit, that’s just human nature. There’s a difference though between calling everything you want given to you for free a “right” and actual rights to things needed to live and prosper by your own work.
Duke, amendments don’t give rights. At the same time, we have watched in silent compliance as the 1st and the 4th have been reduced to comic book status.
Up here in Canada, where you need a license to own a firearm, it gets me to thinking about voting. I mean, we only let someone possess a firearm with special rules around it, but any idiot with a pulse can vote. In this system, firearms are considered uniquely dangerous and important, and therefore “ownership” is strictly controlled.
I wonder if the average Canadian voter has considered the implications of that.
(note that this also applies in other nations, as well as a number of US states).
In a stable, functioning democracy, votes are far more powerful and dangerous than guns. Here in the US the founders indented only free, white, male landowners to vote.
They were classist racist, and sexist no doubt! But what they were trying to ensure was that only those who were educated and vested in the outcomes could impact those outcomes. Clearly this is no longer the case here, as we dismissed classism, racism, and sexism, and rightly so. However we also, accidentally I believe, or perhaps for want of other means, dismissed any requirement or certitude that the electorate be either vested or educated. This will eventually be our downfall: Mindless mobs, paying no taxes and having neither understanding nor interest, voting themselves the benefits of the public treasury, until either the producers revolt and assert power, or flee, and all comes crashing down for lack of funds like every other experiment in unrestricted socialism.
In a democracy, guns only prove their political utility when it is no longer stable or functioning.
Funny coincidence those who agitate to destabilize the Republic also seek to restrict the possession of arms. I mean, it is just a coincidence, right?
Him and his minions won ww2. He was babtized so dont talk too much smack bout him or he will kick your ass in christian heaven along with hitler…
Oh please spare me the revisionist re-writing of history! You are either a supremely ignorant individual, or you are a bald faced liar.
Stalin was a communist, which bases it belief system on a very loud and vociferous denial of the existence of G-d as an “opiate of the masses”. And he murderously enforced that belief against Christians and it’s priests. Along with 50 million other fellow Russians. Along with godless Mao with his 80 million Chinese, and godless Pol-pot with his “paltry” 2 or 3 million.
Hitler was a Nazi, slang in German for National Socialist. And his primary logo was a symbol from an Eastern religious belief system.
You can continue to paint Christianity as some type of murderous belief system; but the reality is that while it has been used by power mad tyrants to rally the “useful idiots” (per Stalin) ,to impose control and commit mass murder in the past, it is the current “useful idiot atheists” rallied by the current power mad tyrants that have committed hundreds of millions deaths, all in the name of the demi-god called the state, in the last hundred years.
History will look back on the current crop of those claiming no belief in God as the greatest mass murderers in all of history, and as especially evil, because of thier defense of the tens of millions murdered of the most vulnerable and helpless among us, (otherwise known as unborn babies), as a “right”.
A prevailing view among Christians is that those aborted babies never reached the so-called “age of accountabilty” so in spite of their Adamic nature their entrance into Heaven is a forgone conclusion.
You may grieve about their death by abortion but allegedly ….they won’t.
“Prevailing”?, as in 1%, 10%, 50% 99.9%? What I have seen, is that for the majority of if not greater, as in better than 50% of Christians, believe that life begins at conception.
READ !!! Nothing in my post said anything about when life begins. I was discussing only the destination of the souls of the aborted babies, ie their deaths.
Tell me, where do the souls of the aborted babies end up ?
True. I didn’t read it correctly. Of course the souls of the unborn are a line straight to heaven. But what is your point? That it is a good thing that so many children being murdered are going to heaven? Sorry, I know that isn’t your point.But the judgement of a people and a culture that would make such an abomination not just legal, but a “right” will be severe!
What is my point ? Are you kidding ?
“What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but LOSES HIS SOUL ?”
What is the conversion rate ( saving souls from eternal torture ) of the most persuasive evangelist against an abortion doctor ? Only one man can claim a 100% succes rate. Guess which one ?
Even atheist Christopher Hitchens was against abortion and considered it immoral
but if Christian themselves believe saving a soul from Hell is the ultimate and overriding priority of human life then abortion is adding MILLIONS and MIILLIONS of people into Heaven who would likely consider being aborted a small price to pay for the pleasure of not being burned alive for eternity.
That is my point.
WOW! You are saying abortion is a good thing!
PDW, if you can’t see the inherent evil of ending a life, before it even had to chance to experience it outside the womb, then you are lost in a darkness of evil, of which I cannot even comprehend. Too many would and do agree with you.
Come quickly Lord! And send the light of your love to those capable of receiving it.
Are you insane ? I never said whether abortion was good or bad. At all. Ever. I don’t BELIEVE IN SOULS.
I simply commented on the relationship between the ridiculous belief in souls, eternal judgement, and your opinion that the millions of victims of abortion automatically go to heaven. Heaven is better than Hell….right ?
You’re only slightly less crazy than those other weirdos who go around blowing themselves up because their God told them to……
I see. I believe in the sanctity of life, even the life of an unborn baby, and that makes me “insane” and places me in the same realm as a jihadist that will blow himself and a bunch of innocent men, women and children to bloody bits. Riiight.
I stand by what I said PDW.
Dude you are REALLY ignorant. It’s true the soviets did most of the fighting and dying in WW2. However the soviets never would’ve won without support from the US and Britain, AND the US opening up against Japan, to prevent Japan from opening up a second front on Russia. People have forgotten the numerous metric tonnes of medical supplies, food, weapons, ammo, tanks, and planes we gave the USSR before they could get their factories back up and running. Most of the Soviets manufacturing base was captured by the Nazis in the first few months of the war, as they steam rolled to Moscow. People forget how fast the vermacht went from Poland to the gates of Moscow. We’re all very lucky the soviets managed to survive the first year of that war to come back bigger and badder then they ever were.
So what is your point Hank? Stalin still killed millions of Russians before the war, during the war and after. He starved millions to death in the Ukraine while collectivizing the farms. Stalin was a monster, even if he was key in defeating Hitler.
Can you read? My post was all about describing how important AMERICA’S effort in the war was.
Hideous crimes against humanity aside, that is a kick ass image. I need a painting like that of myself.
An awful lot of Clinton folks have had odd endings.
They are a watered down version of Stalin.
Slick’s nads weren’t big enough, Hillary’s certainly are.
I can easily see Hillary calling a MOAB strike on a Conservative subdivison or enclave.
For all of the Putin admirers out there know that;
1) Vladimir wants to change the city name Volgograd back to Stalingrad
2) In Crimea and in eastern Ukraine where Russian troops have taken over, the Kremlin has ordered posters and statues of Stalin to be installed in key government office areas.
3) Stalin murdered between 8,000,000 – 12,000,000 Ukrainians from 1932-33 in the largest genocide by famine known as the Holodomor.
4) Something RT “News” will never tell you: Ukrainians fought Russian Communist troops AND German troops during WW2 and four of the leaders of the Ukrainian resistance were not only surgical doctors but were Jewish. Over 2,000,000 Ukrainians died at the hands of the NAZIs who called them subhuman. Remember, the victors write the history.
5) Tens of thousands of the Soviet troops, who fought the NAZIs in Ukraine, who Putin “honors” on May Day were Ukrainian captives who were sent in front of the advancing Russia comminust troops and were mostley unarmed and old to pick up guns they find – if they turned around, they were shot by the Russian army.
6) Putin celebrates May Day with yellow and red communist flags and banners bearing the hammer & sickle AND banners of Stalin
7) Putin has stated that he does not intend to expand Russian gun ownership which includes a 5-year wait to buy any long-arm with rifled barrel (shotguns can be bought as soon as your license is approved). Handguns are outlawed and the only ones which are legal shoot hard rubber bullets. Dmitry Medvedev (Prime Minister) stated that he would like to make the gun laws even more restrictive.
Now you may know why Ukrainians are fighting and many are for a free Ukraine and don’t want the totalitarian EU either. By the way, in Ukraine, although handguns are extremely restricted, one can buy any MSR with any size magazine. Here is Ukraine’s Gander Mountain https://ibis.net.ua/en/products/poluavtomaticheskoe/ See Ukrainian Freedom Fighters of WW2 documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXYyY6lBeUM
I went to a gun store in Kiev. It had some one resting stuff in there. But, if you want a handgun, you go to the bazaar. It’s not legal, but a lot of people buy them anyway.
M1Lou, Thanks for the info! What type of handguns are commonly sold at the bazaar and at what kind of prices? Did they have ammo as well? Pistol ammo is hard to get unless you are licensed as a gun shop or manufacturer and all of the pistol caliber carbines for civilian sale (HK94 type, Cx4, MP-40, etc.) are in 9x21mm.
I’m not sure what they are selling as I never went to find out. I would suspect it’s going to be a lot of stuff like revolvers, Tokarevs and Maks. Some of my wife’s friends have handguns and that is where they purchased them.
You are correct but I believe the whole premise behind changing the name back to Stalingrad is a symbolic homage to the will of the Russian people. Sure, it does bear “the name of the boss”, but it also represented Russia’s most dire hour, and the biggest turning point in Russian and infact world history. To the Russians the city isn’t symbolic of Stalin, but of the astounding victory there. It wasn’t just another battle to them. I don’t even think there is an American battle in history that could be it’s parallel to us. I’d say the closest battle you could compare it to would be the Battle of Britain for the British. Perhaps you could compare it to early days of our revolution when Washington pulled off some miraculous victories as the existence of the United States teetered on the brink.
” I don’t even think there is an American battle in history that could be it’s parallel to us.”
That battle was called ‘Gettysburg’…
Perhaps, but Stalingrad was absolutely enormous, with as many people in hours as the whole battle of Gettysburg. That’s not to detract from its importance in our history, but after Stalingrad WW2 wasn’t the same war. The Germans never revcovered. They lost an entire Army Group. Had the Germans won, Russia wouldve effectively been knocked out of the war and it would’ve only been the US and Britain facing the vermacht at its height. That would’ve been well before we had any kind of air superiority.
Yep. India means NOTHING. The Brits lost their empire and not just India. We kicked them out in 1781 by force of arms(with armed help). Even Christianity didn’t truly take hold until Roman emperor Constantine went to war with the cross as his standard(for good and bad)…
Like most theocracies, Christianity is restrictive of liberty, capricious, and evil in its effect. It’s no wonder it required force of arms to ‘catch on’. Most evil ideas do. I’ve yet to understand why such things aren’t self limiting. Defense of an idea by arms is one thing, but implementation by force of arms is a good warning sign that the idea is evil. I doubt many people advocate for forcing ideas they believe to be evil on others, but they so often miss the warning signs of a bad idea: unpopular, requires force to implement, needlessly restricts liberty, has no internal mechanism for adaptation or change, is rooted in utopian and unrealistic ideology…Christianity meets virtually all the criteria, including violent exclusivity…and, this is telling, is founded on a death cult. Politically, the primary difference between Judaism, Islam and Christianity is that it has been a very long time since Judaism had the following necessary to violently force itself on others. Make no mistake though, no religion is more than a single or few fanatics and the right events to seize upon from attempting to become a theocracy, and theocracies are inherently evil.
It’s true. Everywhere Christianity has been implemented, there has been mass murder, and a mass Exodus of people trying to escaped the madness and the mass death, to the point where the Christian governments have had to build walls to keep people in, and would kill anyone trying to leave.
Oh, wait, that was communist Russia, and China, and Pol-pot Cambodia, and Vietnam after we left, and Castro Cuba where people were desperate to escape these godless “Utopias” and were killed for trying to leave.
It has been the Hallmark of Christian countries like the USA and much of the recent history of Christian Western Europe of having incredible freedom, civil rights and economic opportunity and it was the west that has been the end point of people from around the world trying to escape tyranny, oppression and mass death.
Did history begin in the 20th century, and since when is the US a christian nation?
No doubt communists have killed more people, but as a defense, it’s rather like saying Jeffery Dahmer is wonderful since he killed so many fewer people than Gacy.
Minus the whole force of arms thing, Christianity would have passed out of history as an obscure death cult offshoot of Judaism.
Forcing ideas and capricious restrictions on liberty on others is wrong no matter what you call it. To the extent that it was forced on entire nations by force of arms it’s evil.
Christians and Communists are not different ‘people’ they have different ideas. Both are founded in absurd utopian dreams, both capriciously and self servingly restrict liberties and both have behaved horribly at times. Both seek to ‘otherize’ non converts, and both claim exclusive rights to the truth. Both have subjugated and murdered as an open matter of course.
Just because it gores YOUR sacred cow doesn’t make it any less true.
Good ideas may need to defend themselves by force of arms, but good ideas never require force of arms for their implementaion, by merely continuing to exist they eventually win out.
Ardent, you sound some what an educated individual, so you should know America was initially founded by Christians escaping religious persecution. And that up through sixties, the greatest majority of Americans were listed as Christian in the census. And that even today, when asked what most Americans see them selves as atheist or believing in a higher power, 75% say they are various denominations of Christian. So yes, even today, America is a Christian country.
And world wide, Christianity is the largest body of people that believe in a certain religion, over a billion.
As for “otherizing” people, you and other atheists do that very well in painting Christians and other people of faith as horrible subhumans that deserve derision, denigration and insults. People like you, other atheists. have committed horrible acts of mass murder, and yes, as so called “Christians” , as well.
But the only “cult of death” that I see, are those promoted by atheists. Demographics is destiny. Atheists, as a group, do not have enough children to replace themselves. Only those groups with a strong religious and spiritual beliefs even come close to having enough children to maintain their population, let alone grow as a population.
Judaism, and Christianity have been around for over 6 thousand years, because they held marriage and children as sacred.
How many cultures based on atheism have been through history? What, none? Why? Because when the belief in no God becomes the norm, the culture is getting ready for a collapse.
You Ardent, and people like you, are the reason darkages happen. You, Ardent, and your beliefs, are the real “culture of death”
Christianity is the cult of life, truth and love. You Ardent and yours, are the real cult of death, destruction, and hate.
Ardent,
Please cite two or three specific examples of such “capricious restrictions on liberty”.
Until I hear from you, I will quote one often claimed example and its INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE CONSEQUENCES TO INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETY:
(1) The “liberty” to be sexually promiscuous and sexually active outside of traditional marriage. The DESTRUCTIVE consequences of this should be readily apparent … but no one ever mentions them:
— unwanted pregnancies
— rampant sexually transmitted diseases
— children in broken homes grow up with various psychological scars
— not enough children born to provide the next generation of LABOR to support the existing aging population.
I have rarely heard of anyone celebrating an unwanted pregnancy. Rather, such events have often been devastating to the mother, father, and extended families involved.
I have never heard anyone celebrate contracting a sexually transmitted disease. (And note that sexually transmitted diseases were quite often a death sentence until the last few decades.)
It is a known FACT that children who grow up without a loving and attentive mother AND father are FAR more likely to have psychological scars that haunt them throughout their adult life. And that is why I have never heard anyone celebrate NOT having a loving and attentive mother and father.
It is also a known FACT that homosexual sex and promiscuous sex with effective birth control do NOT produce children. The consequence of not producing children: there are no young people to do everything that you are eventually unable to do at some point as you age. I have never heard anyone celebrate being unable to move a new heavy piece of furniture into their home and be unable to find anyone else who can do it.
This one example of a “capricious” Christian restriction of “liberty” (banning homosexual sex and promiscuous sex) and the explanation that I included should make it abundantly clear that this “restriction” is anything but capricious or somehow evil. Rather, this “restriction” is for the actual preservation of society.
I could go on. I hope you get the point and will reconsider your thinking.
To be fair, most good ideas regarding liberty require force of arms to catch on too.
Any other day, we’re all in agreement that guns are inanimate objects, having no volition of their own. Today, we’re more divided on the ideas vs. guns debate than even on a hypothetical Yoda vs. Harry Potter matchup.
Guns are just a tool. They derive their vitality and value from the people wielding them, who in turn are driven by ideas.
I believe in this case that guns are a semantical stand in for ‘means of force’. Denying the means of force to this or that person or group is neither inherently good or bad, except for the ideas of the group, or more simply, what they would use the force to accomplish.
In a stable, functioning democracy, denial of the means of force ought to be suspect, since no force is needed to engender change, but may always be needed to maintain the democracy and the liberties it safeguards.
“Denying the means of force to this or that person or group is neither inherently good or bad”.
Ahh, Ardent. So your a relativist. The right right to keep and bear arms is not a G-d given right, so it is not “inherently good or bad” to deny this right, depending on whether the government, and those that happen to be in power, determine if a particular group in question has the “proper” ideas and beliefs.
Or am I wrong?
I disagree. I believe the powers that be of the time saw the writing on the wall. The old roman god’s were dying and dead and the new crop of primarily Gaulish pagan mmigrants with no history or appreciation for Roman history or tradition were replacing the shrinking population of native Romans. They saw the spreading popularity of Christianity and saw it as a threat to thier power. So they stepped in and appropriated and took control of this belief system, and then used it as simply another form of state power and control.
Which is why Hillary and the Democrats are so incensed with the Heller and Citizens United court decisions.
Better pack the court with Liberal judges to disarm and gag those “deplorables”.
Quote of the Day: The Second Amendment Protects The First
The Second Amendment is a TERM for ARMISTICE among SOCIETY.
Chuck it at your peril, AND IT BETTER FING LOOK LIKE YOU’RE HOLDING THE WHOLE DAMN THING UP BY YOURSELF RIGHT UP UNTIL THEN.
Stalin didn’t actually believe that first part, and this is classic double speak from him. The fact is that he pointed guns at anyone who had ideas that disagreed with his. Those people were either buried or disappeared into the Gulag and forgotten. Stalin was one of the masters, if not the master, of using guns to annihilate ideas that he disagreed with. He very much believed in the ultimate power of the gun.
Ideas are powerful, but the truly radical ones rarely get anywhere without guns. Many more are put to a violent end with guns. Stalin was a violent, authoritarian pig who was also afraid that contrary ideas might eventually bring Mussolini’s fate upon him. To that end he used guns to strip away every shred of freedom, autonomy, or dignity possessed by the people he ruled.
Become familiar with literature by and about tyrants like this as often as possible. Know your enemies, recognize their rhetoric. I’ve read some 2,500+ book pages on the history of the USSR and global KGB operations in recent years. The parallels to current SJW movements are eye-opening. Nobody ever got shot in the back by a tower guard for trying to leave a capitalist country.
To uncommon sense:
You are so right about the biblical template regarding parenting, the family unit and it’s effect upon the offspring.
A father and mother are good but children having a father and FOUR mothers is even better.
Jacob/ Israel produced the twelve tribes of Israel by having sex with :
A) Rachel and Leah who were sisters
B) they were also Jacob’s first cousins
C) Billah and Zilpah who were simply female servants with no legal status.
Jacob and his “family values” would fit right in with Ozark hill billies.
Oh PDW. You can hate all you want on an early tribal society and their different societal beliefs as to “appropriate” marriage customs, but you miss the salient point. Judaism, and it’s next evolution of Christianity, are still a very alive and vital belief system followed by over a billion people, 6 thousand years later. Can you say the same about a society based on atheism? Because atheism is not new. It always pops up at the end of every culture, before it collapses into chaos, and a new dark age. It is in fact the cause of the collapse as the culture turns from the inspired directions as to a living culture, and embraces the belief of no gods, and ends up embracing death as the culture dies a violent and bloody extinction.
Oh PDW. You can hate all you want on an early tribal society and their different societal beliefs as to “appropriate” marriage customs, but you miss the salient point. Judaism, and it’s next evolution of Christianity, are still a very alive and vital belief system followed by over a billion people, 6 thousand years later. Can you say the same about a society based on atheism? Because atheism is not new. It always pops up at the end of every culture, before it collapses into chaos, and a new dark age. It is in fact the cause of the collapse as the culture turns from the inspired directions as to a living culture, and embraces the belief of no god, and ends up embracing death as the culture dies a violent and bloody extinction.
The early tribal arrangements I referenced came with God’s approval ( the sister-wives Leah and Rachel’s prayers were answered in their jealous baby making competition ).
If God is the God of moral absolutes ….and he by his blessing of this polygamous marriage implicitly approves of multiple wives and concubines for Jacob…. then who are you to second guess his “perfect wisdom” ? Why do Christians abhor what God had already approved of ?
BTW, God approves “ripping up” pregnant women in Hosea 13:16. Death to both mother and child, it would seem ?
So PDW. I see you ignored my main point. Because you can’t rebut it. Show me the societies that are based on atheist beliefs, that are still in existence today. You can’t. They collapse into chaos, once the denial of a higher power becomes the norm.
I was thinking about your statement in another post that I am insane for believing in a higher power, that I believe that G-d created the universe, and all of it’s inhabitants, including human beings.
You see, to me, the bible is an inspired manual, a how to book, on building a viable and healthy growing culture. So based on history, and six thousand years of success, the proofs in the pudding. I practice a belief that works, That is demonstrably sane, because I am practicing a belief that builds a healthy, vibrant and growing culture. You, on the other, are actually the insane one. You base your guiding principles on something that has been shown through all of history, leads to the destruction of the culture that holds this belief, that there in no G-d. Russia being the most recent example of a culture very loudly and proudly was based on the ideas of man, and not on God. And it was nothing but mass blood and death and terror and absolute insanity, to the point where walls needed to be built to try to keep people in. We, though, as a still a primarily Christian country, need to build walls to keep people out. What does that say about our level of freedom, prosperity and opportunity that we built by G-ds guidance?
So I won’t do what you did and ignore the point you brought up. About polygamous marriage in the old testament. This is why the Christ came. He was bringing the next stage of human beings evolutionary spiritual growth. The New Testament. And in this next stage of growth, the marriage between one man and one woman was and is to be one of G-ds new covenants.
In the end, PDW, it really does not matter if you think I’m insane for believing in G-d, or if I think you are insane for NOT believing in G-d. Because in the end, the victor rights the history books. And from all of the six thousand years of the proof of the success of people like me believing in the one true G-d, and by his own word, the world will become The Christs footstool, and those that do not voluntarily bow to the supremacy of the one that sent him, will no longer find a place at his table.
What was it that someone said, “Insanity, or brilliance, is measured by the level of his failure or his success”. I guess we will find out which of us was insane, or brilliant(inspired) by who is left standing as the majority belief, when the final curtain falls.
The quote is actually “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?” It’s not a quote about subjugation of the Soviet people, but about keeping their enemies from fighting back.
Every quote you read on the internet is true. – Abraham Lincoln
“The Second Amendment Protects The First”
This should be a reminder to the marxist that are infesting our schools and colleges who try to take away our right to fee speech.
And specifically, this should be a reminder to the Antifa’s.
We don’t need permission from the State to exercise our right to defend our lives while we are exercising our right to free speech.
I glad we have a second amendment by those great Dead White godly Men, when people who support taking down confederate statues and also erect a statue of Joseph Stalin in Washington state!!!!
I’m also glad Christianity brought literacy to the western world. And ended slavery. The atheist of the French Revolution tried to make a utopia. Lenin wanted a utopian then Stalin, while Hitler was still in jail. All three were atheist.
Atheists have never believed in individual liberty. They are tyrants at their core. Historically they have never supported the Bill of Rights.
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