James Adkins

I am done with you and this site. I need a fucking shower. You disgust me.

My problem is with the wholesale condemnation of entire populations as immoral and worthy of death. Instead of simply saying that we will do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves, that it is regrettable but their goverment made it necessary, an attempt was made to say that the people deserved to die because of an uninformed notion about what is possible to a person in a police state. Of course, it is their resposibility and theirs alone to change their government. But it is not immoral or irrational to recognize the limits placed on people by the existence of a brutal police state and to take that into account when deciding whether or not to destroy entire cities. If it is necessecary, then do it. It doesn't matter at that point whether they are innocent or guilty. If it isn't necessary, or you know it probably won't work, and you do it anyway, or advocate it, in order to punish people without regard to innocence or guilt, that is immoral.

There is no duress. There is no law enforcement draft, and you can quit anytime you want. No one will put you in jail if you don't join the Marshall's service or any other law enforcement agency, or if you resign once there. Not the same as taxes at all. You're going in with open eyes, you know the things you'll be asked to do. You'll have to make your peace with it. What you do is entirely your responsibility and no one else's. You can't look back on it one day and use the excuse that it wasn't your choice. It was. Good luck.

No, but it does put a stop to the ridiculous direction in which you were taking it. As for 'difficult", look up the effects of the East German PPM-2 anti personnel land mine on the human body and let me know if the word difficult really applies here. Some reading on the workings of a police state might also help your understanding of the situation (movies and spy novels don't count). While I agree with the "thrust of the rest of this thread", and the morality of this type of use of force if necessary, when it comes to assessing other's options in these situations you have no idea what you're talking about. It's easy to say resist, but not so easy to actually do it when doing so will get your entire family executed. While this isn't our problem, so to speak, it should at least temper one's enthusiasm for carpet bombing and thermonuclear weapons.

In some states it was mandated by law that the pledge be said every morning in school. I don't know how many of those laws still exist, though. There was no legal punsihment for refusing, but a few students were suspended for refusing. I agree though, we have much bigger problems.

I'm not dodging anything, you are by asking us whether or not it is acceptable to go against your beliefs. Only you can answer that for yourself. I thought I answered your question when I said there were better ways to make money. But, if you really need to know: It is not OK to violate your principles. Did you really expect another answer?

It doesn't have to be you.

You will be. There is no "what if". There are better ways to make money.

The entire border between east and west Germany was heavily defended. It was the most heavily defended border in the world for a while (even more so than the 38th parallel). Both the US and Russia expected a conventionally fought WWIII to begin along that border. The entire length was covered by walls, fences, land mines, and hundreds of thousands of East German and Soviet troops. There were 350,000+ Soviet troops alone in East Germany. This is not even counting the East German military. 350,000+ troops is roughly twice what America has in Iraq right now and East Germany was roughly 25% the size of Iraq. Again, this isn't including the East German military. Most of the troops were concentrated along the border to repel an invasion that the Soviets were sure was coming sooner or later. The situation with the Polish and Czech borders was much better, but who the hell would want to go there; they were worse off than the East Germans and they would have just been sent back to be executed anyway. There was no way out. People were still dying in escape attempts all along the border into the late 80s. Are you suggesting they were morons who could have simply found some farmers field and walked across like going from Canada to America? To suggest that they could merely leave is naive in the extreme.

You don't have to blindly trust anything. I said paper money wouldn't be used more than it is now, which, for most people, is almost never. You can still use it, or the actual gold or silver; nothing will change. But, unless every dollar you own is in your closet or under the mattress, you're trusting electronic funds. Once you deposit it, it's electronic, and whether you go to the teller or the ATM to get it out you're trusting electronic funds to work in order to be able to get it. I understand what you're saying, though. Cash is king. It's accepted everywhere.

Taking an oath to the government raises the government above the individual and implies that the individual's purpose is to serve and obey the government. This is a reversal of the proper relationship. The proper function of government is to serve the individual by protecting his rights, and if it doesn't it should be removed and replaced with one that will. Any proper oath would be to uphold and defend the principles of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, not the government as such. Of course, everybody elected to public office takes that oath and ignores it completely. Besides, have you seen the pictures of the original salute? It will send shivers down your spine.

Yes, very nicely indeed, and yes. Seriously, though. A true bank note is nothing more than bearer paper - a check meant to be used more than once. Paper money originally started as warehouse receipts for gold that were eventually used as a currency in place of the actual gold coins, as a convenience. They were much easier to lug around on an everyday basis and could be printed in denominations much smaller than standard sized coins making them easier to spend. As long as the currency is backed 100% by gold, meaning there would be no fractional reserve banking allowed, there wouldn't be a problem with banks printing their own currency. Given the cost of doing it right, considering the ease of modern counterfeiting techniques, it would probably be standardized and provided by several big suppliers, just the same as gold and silver coins are handled by private mints. Universal acceptance need not be a problem. The market will find a way to facilitate trade. With modern methods of banking and their private counterparts like ebullion and egold, etc., it wouldn't be necessary to use actual paper or coin currency any more than is done today; it would mostly be done electronically. Global trade would hardly be affected at all. This is how it was done for thousands of years. Here is a great economics text (caution it's big ~15 mb) -Capitalism. The discussion of gold starts on pg 1007 of the pdf file or 951 of the text book, if you happen to have a copy. He gets into remonetizing gold and silver at the end of page 1015 of the pdf or 959 of the text (although the whole section is worth reading, in fact the whole book). Murray Rothbard gives a similar way of doing it here. There are many others, but it is definitely possible and worth doing. All it would take is a monetary crisis with the dollar, which might happen sooner rather than later, and will happen eventually in any case given the nature of fiat currency, and the political will could be found to make it happen. If not, it will happen privately on its own.

The government shouldn't be printing anything on my money. It shouldn't be making money. But, if it's going to anyway, it should be imprinted with the weight and fineness of the gold coin, or, if it's paper, how much gold is backing it and where I can go to get it. And other than a pretty picture of an eagle or something that should be about it. Certainly nothing about make believe beings. The pledge of allegiance should be eliminated, especially the "under god" part. It was written by a christian socialist named Francis Bellamy (without the god reference, originally)in order to promote Nationalism (not patriotism) - as in National Socialism. He was a big believer in his cousin's book Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 and he wrote the pledge to bring us closer to it. Truly evil stuff.

Does this mean they don't exist? Things or objects cannot be good or evil in and of themselves - whether they are found in nature or produced. Good or Evil is a moral judgement and it depends on the context of their use. Using heroin to evade reality is immoral, using it to fight the pain of end stage cancer is not. Context.

People keep saying that, but take his quote and change it to this: and it wouldn't have been met with an insult. Why? Why not just engage them and find out whether they are irrational or not and then treat them accordingly? People are individuals and will vary in knowledge and outlook. Why write them off because of an issue they may know absolutely nothing about, either because of a lack of knowledge, or an honest error and a lack of someone to point it out and explain it to them?