Maaaaaaaarten said:
People, let's keep it on-topic please.
There's plenty I want to say about all of this, but let's keep religion in the religion topic alright?
I mean, obviously religion can be very relevant and on-topic with regards to world politics, however, the way this discussion is going it belongs in the religion topic.
Why is this not on topic? We have been discussing same-sex marriage. A large portion of the resistance to this comes from people who apparently believe in Biblical literalism, at least two of whom have been posting on this thread. In fact, I’d guess that at this point the great majority of people who oppose same-sex marriage do so on religious grounds. Any response to this religious view is most definitely on topic in the debate on same-sex religion. There’s hardly anything more relevant.
The real problem is that religion is sticking its nose into issues about which it has nothing relevant to say. Instead of admonishing posters for discussing religion on a politics thread, you should be criticizing those who political beliefs are based on religion, making injection of religion into this discussion inevitable. If you don’t “like the way this thread is going”, why weren’t you criticizing these same beliefs when they were posted in the religion thread?
A couple of months or so ago, there was an extended discussion on that thread concerning whether it was fair for certain businesses to deny services to gays. Everyone who did not criticize that view—and IIRC, you were one of them--was in effect inviting discussions of the Bible in the politics thread. If you think what the Bible says is a valid argument for opposing same-sex marriage, then of course the Bible deserves to be criticized in the politics thread. Reap what you sow, you know?
Where exactly do you draw the line? It's OK for two posters to justify opposition to same-sex marriage based on the Bible, but not OK for other posters to criticize their view? If you don't "like the way this thread is going", why didn't you speak up as soon as religion was brought into the discussion? Or if you think religion "can be very relevant and on-topic with regards to world politics", how? What is an example of where it's relevant, and where it's not?
Here's another post that, by your standards, is probably off-topic (it should go in the economics thread)
Chris Hedges on Marx’s prescience:
The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.
Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible.
Bloomberg News in the 2013 article “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” reported that economists had determined that government subsidies lower the big banks’ borrowing costs by about 0.8 percent.
“Multiplied by the total liabilities of the 10 largest U.S. banks by assets,” the report said, “it amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion a year.”
“The top five banks—JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.—account,” the report went on, “for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits. In other words, the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry—with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy—would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/karl_marx_was_right_20150531
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram