I think they have, haven't they?

All I know is the sooner everyone stops getting morally outraged over their shenanigans, the sooner they'll stop doing what they do.

They've been known to get in some trouble, so to speak, when picketing the wrong-er places they've sometimes chosen to picket. I recall one gentleman was arrested outside of a court at which the WBC were fighting a case.

He'd shown up with a truck full of guns.


In other news, I think if you're an entirely white, insano christian group, you have to be PRETTY ****ING BAD in order for the KKK to organise a counter-protest against you.

So....Did the three guys kill the kids or not?

No.

Did they ever find the killers then?

Not that I'm aware of.

If someone decided to go to the Westborough Baptist Church and slay like 20 of them with an assault rifle, would the remaining members picket their funeral?

:yikes:

Into the rabbit hole.

I think they did, they were found guity, but thanks in part to media coverage and the aid of Hollywood celebs they were given time served.

The thing with the WBC is they're calvinists. They believe that absolutely everything that happens on earth is preordained by god, except for the actions of those preordained by god to be part of the elect few who will actually go to heaven.

They also believe that only the WBC qualifies as that elect few. Which is to say, Fred Phelps believes that his family, and his family alone, comprise the entirety of God's favoured people.

How they'd react to half of them being gunned down, would be rather more interesting than I think I can reasonably speculate on.

(Note: This is also why they picket. They believe the god preordained the sins of everyone who isn't in the WBC, and so their pickets are to celebrate the actions of god, who caused his unchosen to sin, that he may strike them down.)


Yes, I'm aware of how completely insane that is.

And as usual you have Obama ignoring the separation of Church and State in his speech tonight.


How are you going to talk about God, Heaven and the Scripture and the hope they can provide at this time? Not very comforting to say the least.

He's an american president. As sad and horribly depressing as it may be, and as much as you might not want to admit this, the fact is that if he doesn't make an effort to show allegiance to god, he loses part of the electorate and part of the popular opinion.

Not to mention, this is the man whose first 4 years in office were largely marred by and tarnished by the deluded and insane debate over whether he was a muslim or not. A debate which he put to rest on no fewer than 3 occasions with documented evidence that some complete whack jobs still believe was forged.

Is it any ****ing wonder he talks about that ****? He stands more to gain by playing up the religious angle than by fighting from a completely secular position.

They also believe that if people are responding so strongly that they must be doing the right thing. If someone did kill a bunch of them, they'd feel even more motivated to promote their message.

This is true, however much that conflicts with their belief that everything but them is preordained.

You're probably right. I guess I overestimate the average American's intelligence.

You think they're guilty even despite the DNA evidence to the contrary?

America's rough political center, taken as a country, is pretty much racist, capitalist christian white males. I'm afraid its going to be quite some time, if it happens at all, before the changing political climate (Increases in atheist demographics, greater equality for men and women, greater equality for ethnic groups), develops into a force that can genuinely influence a candidates choice of political platform away from that and more towards a secular, non-misogynist and non-racist viewpoint. To say nothing of any real pro-LGBT representation anywhere within government at all. Not necessarily even an elected LGBT poltician persay, but rather a politican that at least genuinely empathises with and will vote in accordance with a pro-LGBT belief out of basic human decency, which I don't believe is currently the case. Or rather, it could be the case, but it would be political suicide on a national stage (thanks to america having so many extremely bigoted but politcally important demographics) so its kept very low key so as to not ruin chances on the campaign trail in a politicians later career.

No, it really isn't.

Bear in mind I'm not talking about the demographics of the population as much as politicians. America has a lot of ethnic, cultural, religious, and racial diversity in its population, but that's not reflected in either your government or your wealthiest citizens (IE, those citizens with the most political power and influence). In fact, of your 150 wealthiest people, not one of them is black. On top of that, only 3 of the US states have ever had a Black Senator, and only ONE US state has had a Black Senator in the 21st century.

On top of THAT, whatever you may believe, I think it speaks volumes that when running against Obama to become the democratic candidate in 2008, Hillary Clinton's campaign team apparently sought to gain an advantage by photoshopping Obama's campaign image to make him have darker skin. This is a woman who was gunning for president of the US, and she chose that approach?

Did you just use a political campaign that couldn't even make it past the primaries as an example of "America's political center"? :laughing:

The sad part is this even will be etched in the minds and hearts of the family, friends and schoolmates of those victims forever. It will be a tragedic loss that will be them always. It is absolutely depressing.

The wife of an ex president either decided on her own or was advised to play up her opponents race in order to attain success. Then again, you might be right. Maybe her campaign staff were just idiots. Romney was advised to campaign heavily in favour of waterboarding after all... then again, even Romney was smart enough not to actually DO it.

Bloozcruz posts a video and changes the subject - great post on the problems with mental illness being the real problem ignored.

Go **** yourself, internet.

I think it may have been discussed more if the person who posted it hadn't just posted the link, and had in fact elaborated on their own view of the article in question.

Regardless, I read the article, and much of it is very true and very correct. I probably would have responded to it, but I made the mistake of reading the comments, and one person dismissing the entire concept of mental illness. As someone whose family works with the disabled, who has disabled family, and who has friends and family who have suffered, in some cases quite badly, from mental illness, this resulted in me doing something I practically never, ever do, which was to be genuinely angry at something on the internet. As hard as it may be to believe, as heated as I may get in a discussion, I am almost never, ever actually annoyed in a real and tangible sense. However dismissing the entire concept of mental illness as mental weakness, rather sets me off.

Ergo I relieved my frustrations over an IM with someone rather than rage at the empty, soulless void of the wider internet. So, sorry, that meant I didn't write about it in this thread. But maybe someone else would have, if you'd added even a single word of your own ("Thoughts?") in order to start the discussion.

Yes maybe if I wasn't such a lazy **** and had given my opinion on it, someone then might have ignored the pissing match over a video that was off-topic and unrelated.

Except that my posts prior were related to the topic I posted a link about.

America has increasingly become a violent place. That is the reality. More people and more want weapons. And most people who want those are bunch of unstable individuals like Adam Lanza. We need to do something on guns always more fools end up with weapons and we will witness another tragedy like this.

You're a saint for bothering. When I hear statements like the one you quoted, I think of the people who say things like "Remember how great things were in the 50's? When TV wasn't vulgar and kids were decent to their teachers in school?"

And you just wonder if they even knew that the South was still segregated and the whole country didn't have highways.

Yep, violence has definitely gone down a lot since past times.
Strangely, America's perception of violence has countered the actual statistics.
Well, not strangely... look at this media we have.

It's no wonder that a lot of Americans feel less safe now than they did not 20 years ago, and crime statistics have actually fallen since then. We don't even need to hint at the probability that most people's perception of the safety status of the outside world is largely dictated by mainstream media. Nor do we need to really debate the tendency of people to not actually factor in the population at large and compare the occurrences to come up with a set of odds relevant to their life.
Instead, we end up with people that experience a constant sensationalist media sputum of almost glorified violence because it gets ratings. The crime drops, yet their fear of crime rises.
Unfortunately, we won't ever hear the mainstream media telling us we're safer than we were a decade or two ago. That might cause people to feel like their lives are ok, and maybe they can stop trawling the news daily so they can figure out how they're likely to die the next time they walk out of their house...

Actually I don't even remember where the discussion left off or what link your reffering to now. I've been kind of vaguely keeping up with the discusson since the gun control issue. Several different things got brought up, and I kind of just said to heck with it because footballs been on most all afternoon, and thats kept most of my attention to be honest.

This will happen again. And again and again until the utterly mad legislation that allows joe public to walk into a store and walk out with a f*cking gun in their hands.

It's insane and I will never, ever understand it.

However here is an example of how someone with the help of a gun actually did save lives at a school. Of course the media doesn't want you to know that.

Pearl High School shooting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is really sad, I don't understand how somebody could do this. I wonder what could possibly be the reason for killing so many people, including children and even your own mother. Just disgusting. I would never be able to feel good about myself if I'd killed anyone.

Has the police released any information regarding the reason he did it?

Watch this video via the link. The NRA are blaming schools and music videos for it and saying there needs to be a database of people who are mentally ill and security in schools! WTF! That's not going to stop massacres. Gun control might but people can still get passed by using the black market. The NRA are so stupid and want blame everyone else.

http://edition.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp...e-presser.pool

Anybody brought up how the NRA's solution is to have more guns in schools, and post armed guards? :laughing:

NPR said the cost of such a policy would be around 8 billion dollars :laughing:

this was Freebase Dali's suggestion though, so maybe he can shed some light on how this would be productive