Even stupider than "freedom fries"

[Lemur]

This isn't a major news piece, but I don't know where else to put it, so it gets its own thread.

Mississippi Rep. Steve Holland has introduced a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

So abysmally stupid. Hey, maybe we should rename the Atlantic Ocean the "Liquid Freedom Expanse," and maybe the Mississippi river should be called "Flowing Patriot Waterway."

Seriously, there's something very Stalinist about these attempts to rename colloquial objects and geographies. It's head-slappingly stupid, but it's also creepy.

[Tuuvi]

Turns out Rep. Holland was just being a troll.

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/blog...-spamalot-bill

I get that the GOP's stance on illegal immigration is ridiculous and borders on racism sometimes, but submitting spam legislation seems immature and foolish to me.

[Lemur]

Gah, that is a relief. I was ready to pound my head on the desk for a bit. I been trolled.

[Fragony]

Russian territory's are allready in Chinese power as well, the whole of the Caucasus really. Believe me a girl I knows really well she teached English there it's in every Chinese schoolbook

[Vladimir]

Turns out Rep. Holland was just being a troll.

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/blog...-spamalot-bill

I get that the GOP's stance on illegal immigration is ridiculous and borders on racism sometimes, but submitting spam legislation seems immature and foolish to me.

Don't let reason interfere with a perfectly decent knee-jerk response. /thread

[Lemur]

Don't let reason interfere with a perfectly decent knee-jerk response. /thread

What an inane thing to say. I posted, Tuuvi cleared it up, and I stated that I had been trolled. It's very odd for you to do a victory dance under such conditions.

-edit-

Looks like this is a trend; more lawmakers are proposing troll legislation. Details:

Oklahoma legislators introduced a bill yesterday that says "the life of each human being begins at conception." But state Sen. Constance Johnson, a Democrat, decided that the bill, SB 1433, didn't go far enough to protect unborn children.

Johnson added an amendment to the bill, posted online by The Lost Ogle, that says life actually begins at ejaculation: “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

Or this one:

The Virginia Senate, for years a firewall against efforts to restrict abortion, today is poised to pass a bill to require that pregnant women undergo an ultrasound and get a chance to see the image before having an abortion. [...] Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax County, was dismayed enough by the bill's progress that she tried to amend it so men seeking prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication such as Viagra would be required to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test.

She said that's "only fair, that if we're going to subject women to unnecessary procedures, and we're going to subject doctors to having to do things that they don't think is medically advisory."

[Sasaki Kojiro]

These all seem stupid.

[lars573]

What an inane thing to say. I posted, Tuuvi cleared it up, and I stated that I had been trolled. It's very odd for you to do a victory dance under such conditions.

-edit-

Looks like this is a trend; more lawmakers are proposing troll legislation. Details:

Oklahoma legislators introduced a bill yesterday that says "the life of each human being begins at conception." But state Sen. Constance Johnson, a Democrat, decided that the bill, SB 1433, didn't go far enough to protect unborn children.

Johnson added an amendment to the bill, posted online by The Lost Ogle, that says life actually begins at ejaculation: “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

Or this one:

The Virginia Senate, for years a firewall against efforts to restrict abortion, today is poised to pass a bill to require that pregnant women undergo an ultrasound and get a chance to see the image before having an abortion. [...] Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax County, was dismayed enough by the bill's progress that she tried to amend it so men seeking prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication such as Viagra would be required to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test.

She said that's "only fair, that if we're going to subject women to unnecessary procedures, and we're going to subject doctors to having to do things that they don't think is medically advisory."

Wait this guy is trying to pull off a double whammy of outlawing masturbation and abortion? Ball bearing on that guy.

[PanzerJaeger]

Oh I don't know, it's kind of a throwback to an American spirit that doesn't exist anymore (even if it is just a troll). Americans used to be brash, arrogant, and audacious instead of cautious, cynical, and self-satisfied. They used to believe in obnoxious concepts like manifest destiny and had the drive to actually make them reality. Nations deserved to rise and fall through resolve and determination, not laurels won generations before. But out of that superciliousness was forged a unique national character, a will to succeed that made America the most productive, prosperous nation on earth. The United States was never more successful than when she was replacing 'Mexico' with 'America' on the world's globes.

[rvg]

How about having the drive and resolve to be a truly tolerant and enlightened people?

Tolerance and enlightenment is overrated. Just look across the pond.

[PanzerJaeger]

How about having the drive and resolve to be a truly tolerant and enlightened people? Let's not forget manifest destiny came at a HUGE cost, and most Americans didn't see what we could today call "Tangible Gains" from those policies. Manifest destiny set the stage for us to be where we are today, and we waste it on anti-masturbation bills?

Can you explain what the 'huge' cost of manifest destiny was? With some clever land purchases and a few relatively minor wars, the United States more than doubled the size of the nation, incorporating enormous sums of natural resources and access to ports on the Pacific Ocean (and I'm not even counting Alaska). Countless millions of lives and trillions of (adjusted) dollars have been expended in Europe over far smaller parcels of land. Americans will benefit from those gains for as long as the nation exists.

If you want to talk about being a bold and noble people who set new standards and shatter old barriers, you should not be supporting dumb bills like those.

Hehe, I do not support such a bill. It is indeed stupid. I was using it as a springboard to pontificate on the state of the nation. America is a more mature country, and while we have gained a higher level of collective sobriety about such things, we have lost a bit of the drive that made us unique in the process.

[PanzerJaeger]

The cost was several wars and virtual extinction of Native American cultures. I'm not going to say it was all bad, because we are certainly better off for it, but I'm saying that it was not all peaches and roses. Over the course of the 1800s, more Americans died for Mainfest Destiny than ever saw real gains from it. Settling new land was always harder than expected, and it was the later generations that benefitted--if the original generation even made the trip. There was huge human cost, and while that's understandable I think that is reason enough to not be advocating another "Manifest Destiny" movement. We haven't figured out how to properly use what we got from the first one.

I dispute the notion that manifest destiny cost the nation huge losses. It is pretty clear that the opposite is true. The wars were some of the most successful in our history. (Although I suppose one could argue that an early form of manifest destiny led to the disastrous invasion of Canada, but that was a fairly small scale campaign.) Frontier life was hard, but it was largely voluntary and not particularly costly to the nation on a macro level. And while it was devastating to the various Native American nations, their losses were America's gains. They were not US citizens at the time, so it is difficult to argue that their suffering can be counted as American suffering.

I'm not advocating a modern form of manifest destiny (where would we go? Canada?). My response was simply an intellectual exercise. The article reminded me of a time when Americans actually did things like that, and on balance, the nation is better for it.

Oh, we're plenty unique, but that loss in drive you're talking about would be when we decided to take up the mantle of "Strongest in the World." Plenty of nations have done that, and it's not special to be the next big giant empire. We should maybe stop looking at old European ideals of civilization to motivate us.

I blame the growth of entitlements and the welfare state. There's something about truly living without a net that brings out a determination in people that isn't often seen today. Again, not saying we should go back to that lifestyle, but it had its advantages on a grand scale.

[a completely inoffensive name]

PJ is right about one thing. Americans are too damn cynical nowadays. No one wants to have America take on big challenges. If Obama said, "we will put a man on mars within a decade." people would laugh at him and go back to watching their tv. This is why we can't work together either. One presidents big idea is another's "big government" problem and vice versa.

I blame the end of the Cold War and Reaganomics. Soviet's gave us half the things we are proud of because we wanted to beat them in something. Once we "won", we became complacent. And the idea that we must be dependent on the rich, errrr, "job creators" to create our economy for us subverts the individual's will. Steve Jobs created lots of jobs...in China. It's all about small businesses under 500 workers. You gotta tell everyone that that is how the economy becomes strong and that anyone can do it if we help out the middle class with tax breaks for small business owners.

[Papewaio]

I heard a statistic for the Apollo program that it used 5% of the GDP for ten years. But it generated $14 for every $1 spent.

[Husar]

or the Germans tolerate whoever they don't like, ect.

Pfff, can't even name one!

How well do Americans tolerate middle easterners though? Very often I hear they should just be turned into glass or shot.
Americans may tolerate eachother but when you mention someone who is from abroad it gets a lot worse(unless the American in question is >1/16th of whatever country you mention), and that's where your comparison fails as well.

[Kagemusha]

All i get from this thread is the feeling that each time one ejaculates.He becomes a mass murderer.

[Tellos Athenaios]

All i get from this thread is the feeling that each time one ejaculates.He becomes a mass murderer.

Round up the parents! They are provably guilty. Won't someone think of the children that could have been...

[Husar]

Exactly, but you miss an important point.

The Americans I'm talking about would call your liberal commie traitor neighborhood unamerican, so it doesn't count!

Your point, sir, has just been turned into glass, with a nuclear orbit cannon shooting a bomb that had "anti-americanism" written on it!

To make a better argument for you, the british, french, dutch and germans sometimes have a similar view of middle easterners.
That it varies a lot is a good and important point, as there is a tendency for younger generations to be more tolerant.
Conservativism naturally dies out or simply changes, just look at bacteria, if they were conservative and never changed, we wouldn't get such beautiful wonders of nature like MRSA.
As such I shall from now on always confuse their, they're and there in an attempt to go with the times.