"Nice church you got here, Frankie. It would be a pity if something were to happen to it..."

For me, it drives my guts nuts, so I only have maybe a couple of drinks a year at social occasions. Other than that, I have a near full bottle of Crown Royal rye that I haven't opened in four years.

Apart from the immorality and violations of International Law of annexing the territory of a sovereign state, I imagine actually extracting rare earths in Greenland is going to cost a helluva lot more than the price China can extract and sell rare earths for. The plan seems like the delusional rantings of a narcissist suffering mid-stage dementia....

Hmmm....

Naval invasion of Greenland next, I suppose. "We have to stop Greenland's rare earths from falling into the hands of a country with huge reserves of rare earths!" Christ, even the imperialists who speared the Mexican-American War at least tried for some sort of rational justification.

If Jefferson Davis and the others had swung like Jodl, von Ribbentrop and other leading Nazis later did, and a lengthy period of military government in which all the symbols of slavery and the Confederacy were actively destroyed and an entire generation brought up learning about the evils of the fathers, then maybe. It didn't entirely work in Germany, well at least in East Germany, but I'd argue that the intentions of the Allied Powers was very much not to make the same mistake the Union had made with the Civil War.

Jesus Christ, even use Lost cause names for the war is enough to suggest you're not debating in good faith.

Lincoln sought to restore the Union, that was his primary goal, but the mere fact that he was an abolitionist and he was elected was enough for most of the slave states to secede. The irony of all of that was that there were still a lot of pro-Union people in those states, but for the leaders of the Confederacy, it had everything to do with leaving the Union before the numbers finally stacked up sufficiently against the slave states that all compromises could be swept aside and an amendment pushed through to abolish slavery.

And Lincoln worked very hard during his presidency to abolish slavery, even using patronage to buy the votes of sufficient Representatives to get the 13th Amendment passed.

A zygote is no more a human being than a tumor is. Misrepresenting science to promote a fundamentally religious position is precisely what I'm talking about.

What I, and more importantly my daughters, do with our bodies is none of your fucking business. None of us believe in your God, and we refused to be bound by what you think your god is telling you to do.

Hey, let's shift the goalposts, heck, let's move the goalposts to some other field entirely.

At some point they'll just start making visitors log in to their social media accounts from kiosks, and giving them boot anyways.

Lesson to all non-Americans, don't go to the United States.

So your argument is "These things I believe in because God says so can be defended, somehow, by not saying God says so, but ultimately, we are founded on God says so..."

Talk about incoherent. And economics led to the scientific revolution, not Christianity, at least not more than Islam (where a good deal of knowledge of medicine and optics came to Christianity through).

Your badly concealed argument still boils down to "God says so." Because no, you can't make an argument against reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights by anything other than invoking your God. I don't believe in your God, or in your historical revisionism either. Christian Supremacism, like white supremacism, is an evil doctrine used by those who want power over others.

Apart from equivocating over 19th and 20th century racism in the Democratic party and ignoring Nixon's Southern Strategy which inverted that curve, the Civil War was explicitly fought over slavery. You're just repeating the same Lost Cause myth that the Union allowed the former Confederate states to spread. The Confederate leaders made their reasons plainly known for secession, and it had everything to do with slavery.

Germany banned Mein Kampf and other Nazi writings for a pretty explicit reason. Actually, it wasn't Germany itself, these bans started during the Allied occupation as a key piece of the Denazification of the country, which also included the destruction of Nazi symbols (statues, motifs, etc.), the criminal and administrative proceedings against Nazi party members, were all part of a concentrated Allied attempt to destroy the very foundations of National Socialist political doctrine in the aftermath of a brutal general war and a genocide that had seen millions of Jews, Roma and political dissidents murdered by an industrial death machine.

Perhaps if the same ethos had been applied during the Reconstruction Era, instead of just hand waving away the culpability of most the Confederate politicians, military officers and officials, and ultimately not merely permitting, but actively supporting the Lost Cause myth, the US might not be in the place it was now. The plans of men like Thaddeus Steven to essentially crush the wealthy landholding class in the South and remake the states were ultimately thwarted by those who wanted an abbreviated Reconstruction for political and commercial expediency.

If the Confederate leaders had been executed or faced lengthy imprisonment, if the former Confederate states had faced the same kind of full social and economic reconstruction that Germany (in particular West Germany and Austria) and Japan had faced, and entire generation had been raised to see clearly and without myth and celebration, just what their fathers had fought not merley to preserve, but to expand; namely, the enslavement of human beings as chattel property, and been taught the fundamental moral evil of that belief, maybe, just maybe, the poison of racism might have, if not been removed, then at least substantially mitigated, making it less likely that the ideological heirs of the slaveowners would have remained a quiet, subterranean group of malcontents, and not a powerful force at the national level, inhabiting the halls of power throughout the US.

Good, so we can now remove the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon from libraries as well, right?

I'd be curious by the time we're done removing all the books from the library that we've justified with "not my tax dollars", what would be left?

What is even the point here? It looks to me like you're trying to use the "tax dollars" argument to disguise your real reasoning for wanting books banned from libraries. So why not just come out in the open and tell us what it is you want banned, and why you feel you have the right to facilitate, even in argument, the removal of these books?

Well, if I was writing a constitution today, I'd make freedom of religion the least of all liberties, trumped every single time by every other liberty. You can litigate if someone tries to reduce your religious liberties, but you are stripped of any right under any circumstances to go after anyone else's, with significant penalties up to and including removal of society.

1. You can't ban reproductive freedoms because you believe God told you to.
2. You can't ban sexual freedoms or non-heterosexual marriages because you believe God told you to.
3. You can't ban books from a library because God told you to.
4. You can't force other people to live with horrifying debilitating diseases (physical or mental) because you believe God told you to.
5. Any attempt to do any of these things will see you removed from society until society can be confident that you understand that your personal beliefs have absolute no authority over any other mature human being.

Some people have a very Aristotelian political view: that there are masters, and there are slaves, and the slaves are, by the nature, subordinate, and cannot be permitted independence, since they'd just muck it up anyways. UBI violates this by basically saying there are no masters and slaves, that people will receive a sufficient income by the mere fact that they *human beings*, and not based on any cultural metric that so many of a conservative bent mistake for intrinsic worth.