LittleWyvern

Here's an interesting development: there's still a chance that Hostess can remain in business.

I just read something interesting about Hostess earlier: it appears as if they've been in a bad financial state since at least 2004. Which seems to say that Hostess was having profitability problems that predated (and were perhaps aggravated by) the union mess. I'm sure another company will buy the various brands and patents previously held by Hostess and do a better job at being profitable.

You know, they could just renounce their citizenship and move to a more conservative country nearby, like... uhh... Alaska?

This is a vague question. I prefer to view men's vs. women's role from the aim that men and women should be equal partners with different roles in any relationship. So, I think reviewing the relationship and asking if both partners and their roles are treated with mutual respect is more important than worrying about submissiveness. It's more of a top-down approach than the bottom-up approach you're making. However, if I were to say something about submissiveness, I view either extreme as equally bad.

Firstly, I meant to type "shouldn't be dependent on," and Second, I said nothing about women acting submissive being a good or bad thing. I'm only saying that men can't blame them being less like men because women aren't submissive enough. You're trying to draw an argument out of somewhere that it doesn't exist.

Did you read my post? What I tried to say is that men can choose to be men regardless of the circumstances. I have no idea where you got this from.

I don't really agree with this: it engages in more blame-shifting than I'm comfortable with. Men being men shouldn't be depending on women acting more submissive.

I view the Tea Party as more than a sticker you put on your already existing political affiliation. Sure, it started as an anti-tax movement, but it's a much more complicated movement than that now. The Tea Party is now it's own political affiliation, encompassing things such as nationalism, paleoconservatism, libertarianism (however weird that sounds when religious conservatives try to play along), etc. Therefore, I don't think it unfair to assign positions (or at least trends) to the Tea Party movement.

Well, yeah, but it's the combination of 1) Reporting the secessionist movement, and 2) Adding positive commentary -or- arguing secession is the right path forward. CNN does report on the secession movement but doesn't do step 2. The sites I link to spend much of their time on step 2.

My claim results from seeing a lot of pro-secessionist posts on news sites I usually associate with the Tea Party: For example, teaparty.org (this link), Infowars, theblaze, etc. I apologize if it seems like I'm trying to assign secession as an official stance of the Tea Party. It's at the very least a stubborn fad within the movement.

No clue. They seem to be the ones that are the most vocal about it, but I have no idea why.

I honestly can't tell if you're a secessionist or just soul-crushingly pessimistic. EDIT: Perhaps this is the root of the Tea Party's secessionist movement: a belief that the USA has somehow become a horrible country that is utterly doomed and has no future.

Although, one could argue that the Tea Party is now an active secessionist group.

Ignoring for the moment your argument that the supreme court is not the final judge on what laws/acts are constitutional and what are not, the argument for secession being against the Constitution goes back to the founding itself (and perhaps even prior to it!) and does not need the Civil War (however a good example it is) to make it work. For instance: Of course it was and is. That's exactly what I'm arguing for.

That's it! We'll call this new country "United Galts of America."

Yes, and I'm not saying creating new governments from old ones is a bad thing. However, a belief in the Constitution being an inspired document makes the difference in this case, at least to me. In my opinion, we've overcome too much as a Union to throw it all away now.

The key disagreement that we seem to run into in all of these threads is the reason why poor people are poor. On the one hand, we have those who believe that poor people are poor because of their environment, social status, or other factors mostly beyond their control. On the other hand, there are those who believe poor people are poor because they have intentionally made bad decisions, harmed themselves, are un-intelligent, or other factors purposely chosen by the person. Obviously there's some combination of the two in play, but the disagreement is where that line is drawn. How much is it somebody's fault that they're poor? The answer to "well, what do we do to eradicate poverty?" depends on the answer to the previous question. The first side would advocate for social assistance and aid unconditionally, the other would advocate for education but no aid. This argument, from an economic standpoint, is very old (think Malthus v. Jones) and there's probably no clear answer. What I think we must not lose focus on is that poor people are still people, and with anything that affects welfare we must keep a humanitarian eye to the problem. Thus, my previous reply was me picturing that classic picture that is often in our churches of someone climbing a stairway, both being helped by someone and helping someone else. We're not going to permanently lift anyone out of poverty by either dragging people up the stairs or giving stern looks to people struggling to climb the stairs and criticising them for not making progress as fast as normal people.

As much as I hate feeding an obvious threadjack, as far as I can remember, the Occupy movement was a protest against entrenched wealth inequality, not the existence of the Union itself.

Depends on how far one can reach.

I just wanted to make that point because the people who are currently advocating for secession are the same people who bash everybody who isn't as patriotic as them for not respecting the Constitution enough. Remember the Jon McNaughton paintings? Remember all the Ezra T. Benson facebook posts during the 2008 cycle about how the Constitution is inspired? I thought the Tea Party were supposed to be the final authority on doing things the constitutional way. Now they're the ones wanting to throw it all away. So, sure, people can advocate for secession all they want, but they lose any pretense of honoring the Constitution in the process. The only people who are saying anything about another Civil War are the ones advocating for secession. This "I'm not saying a war will happen, but a war will happen" philosophy I keep hearing from my conservative facebook friends is almost dangerous.

If anybody wants this functionality, Social Fixer is a browser plugin for facebook that actually does this (via snapshots of your friend list).

Secession is blatantly unconstitutional, as well.

This Church statement just keeps on becoming more useful. :)

It's around the edge of the coin. Because of the words are engraved on the edge, they can quickly wear down and become illegible.

Yeah, this will totally stop all the wall posts from my LDS facebook friends that say capitalism is dead, America will be destroyed, we're all communists/socialists, the economy will completely collapse, etc., etc., right? *checks facebook* Well, a man can dream, can't he?