Posted on November 1 at 9:22 a.m.Suggest removal

Somebody ditched a few too many classes in P SC 1113. America is not really a democracy, it is a republic. You vote for representatives that represent you in Washington. So guess what? You did have a vote: 5 Oklahoma Reps and 2 Senators voting "No".

"How long will this system work before it becomes another failing government program like Social Security?" Social security continues to run a surplus. What a horrible failure, right? As to how to pay for it, one word: taxes! Like all other industrial democracies which have those crazy health care programs better than ours and cheaper too, they are bought through taxes.

Your disdain for poor people is some great stuff also. I'm glad you believe in the right to bankruptcy due to unforeseeable diseases or accidents. It's a shame that you think health care is a privilege. No one should be homeless because they got sick. No one should die because they aren't rich enough.

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Posted on October 20 at 10:57 a.m.Suggest removal

"For instance, it would require us to be able to think of the nation as a whole, rather than a collection of states."

Not sure where you're going with this. It was noted that after the Civil War, people stopped saying "The United States are.." and began saying "The United States is"

You also forget that in most nation's with the parliamentary system, they establish a viability test for a party stipulating that they must secure a certain threshold of the total vote before they are guaranteed any seats. Moreover, this system creates the need for coalition government when there are varying numbers of parties within a congress. This can be a good thing in that it forces parties to work together to form a government, but it also allows for gridlock and stagnation. Look at Iraq. They just broke the record for the longest period after an election without forming a government. That's not to say this would be the case in the U.S., after all we are not too terribly fraught with sectarian divisions like Iraq. Also, parties would presumably have to now slate candidates to be put into those seats and this would invest a great amount of power into the parties to control who gets to Congress and who doesn't.

Last, you think Texas sucks, look at the outlook for Oklahoma:

Mary Fallin - Governor (Hates poor people)
Todd Lamb - Lt. Governor (Hates women)
GOP Senate
GOP House
2 idiot U.S. Senators, one who is dumb, and the other who is a dick.
4 GOP Congressmen and 1 "Democrat"

Bad times ahead.

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Posted on October 12 at 11:34 a.m.Suggest removal

God Evan, how dare you indoctrinate us with facts and empirical studies!

The flip side would argue that the tax cuts give more capital to those that provide jobs and would thereby stimulate job growth, which as was mentioned above appears patently false. Moreover, some argue that taxing the rich even more is wrong because they clearly work harder than other individuals and deserve to see the fruits of their labor. To that I would point out that of the top 10 members of the Forbes 400, 4 of them have the last name Walton. They are the children of Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, and they have $24 billion, $20.1 billion, $20 billion, and $19.7 billion respectively. They didn't do a damn thing to earn that money other than be the fastest sperm one could argue. Quit acting like the hyper-rich are victims. So what if they lose a few million extra dollars in taxes, they still are astronomically better off than the super majority of humanity.

And Evan, you may look into summary line for those students that think reading paragraphs is just too much to ask of them. May I suggest: "tl;dr: Reaganomics blow. If you think their cool, realize that Sean Hannity lies to you every night"

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Posted on September 29 at 9:27 a.m.Suggest removal

"all-too-common tragedies." There are over 4,000 universities in the United States (4,140 is what a google search comes up with) and in the past few years there have been shootings at 3 (Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, and now UT)If you go back 20 years, the number only becomes 9. So there have been shootings on about .2% of all universities in the U.S. in the past two decades. All-too-common indeed.

Roberson doesn't really give a very good argument against the policy though. I highly doubt there would be a correlation between suicide rates and conceal and carry on campus. After all, most students don't live on campus anyway. However, college indeed is an environment infused with high levels of stress. How safe do you think professors will feel with a stressed out, sleep deprived student with a gun in their classroom during midterms? Or how about altercations in the Greek housing during parties? A bunch of belligerently drunk frat guys get in a fight with another frat house and things escalate out of control.

Coker's argument for allowing guns so that it would speedily resolve shootings on campus may also lead to other problems. Say the exchange doesn't last less than 10 seconds or that there are multiple students with conceal and carry licenses. When the police show up, they only see multiple groups of students pointing guns at each other. How are they to identify assailant from defender?

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Posted on September 13 at 8:53 p.m.Suggest removal

@Mustafa,

If you're so comfortable being a massive anti-Muslim, homophobic bigot, why not proudly tell us who you are, instead of being able to hide behind the cloak of anonymity. If you're proud of your views, you shouldn't be afraid to announce your name to us all.

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Posted on September 3 at 12:25 p.m.Suggest removal

Oh god, there's a 3L at OU Law that thinks Glenn Beck makes rational and logical points? Don't let US News & World Report find this out.

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Posted on August 31 at 10:37 a.m.Suggest removal

@Zen_King: Have you read the Old Testament??? You know, the parts where God tells you to stone a woman to death for adultery or to chop her hand off if in the course of stopping a fight between two men, she touches one of their genitals. Or the part that says you can't eat shrimp. Or wear garments of mixed fibers. Yes, your polyblend shirt is a sin, but isn't hell worth a comfy shirt? I think so.

See the thing is you guys are scared of people that aren't like you so you erroneously label them as a threat to you. There are over 1 billion Muslims in the world and you transpose the views of an infinitesimal fraction of one percent upon all of them. Your ignorance would be amusing if it weren't so sad and infuriating.

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Posted on April 29 at 12:36 p.m.Suggest removal

Also @JoeShmoe

As to our responsibilities to rebuild the nation, I totally concur. It’s the so-called Pottery Barn Rule: you break it, you buy it. In JWT, there are considered three phases to a war: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. The first is whether it was just to engage in warfare in the first place. The U.S. failed the test of a just cause by all accounts. Jus in bello entails how you prosecute the war. Here the U.S. fails again. The use of torture, for instance, is strictly prohibited, and yet was made widely used. Lastly, there’s the post bellum, which entails the responsibilities of the victor. Some believe this can be judged entirely separate from the war, while others believe that a bad war necessarily makes a bad peace. I would say a good position is somewhere between those two. The fact that the war was started unjustly does affect its eventual outcome and no matter what we do, it will always be an unjust war. However, reconstructing Iraq is our responsibility and if we do it in a just fashion, then we can help lessen the injustice of our war. It doesn’t help, then, that the first thing we did was protect the oil infrastructure of the nation instead of setting up refugee safe havens for civilians.

And I still hold that soldiers in Iraq have died for an unjust cause. The unjust nature of the initiation of war inherently taints all actions thereafter. Justice was not on our side. Their deaths are tragedies and even more so because they did not need to be there. The blame for their loss lies at the feet of the political leadership that placed them in harm’s way for an unjust cause.

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Posted on April 29 at 12:36 p.m.Suggest removal

@JoeShmoe
“We would be held to inaction because we ‘shook hands’ (i.e., sending athletes to compete in the Olympics) with Hitler at some point”
I fail to see where sending athletes to the Olympics is equivalent to sending Iraq military funding to fight Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. Pointing out that Rumsfeld has a picture shaking hands with Saddam Hussein was merely a rhetorical tool to show that sometimes dictators are our friends, and then a couple decades they are our enemies.

Just War scholarship holds that war is only permissible for a minimal number of reasons. They include self-defense against aggression of oneself or one’s ally (which we were not a victim of any attack by Iraq and neither were our allies) and more recently, a push has been made for allowing it for humanitarian intervention. Moreover, Just War scholars are hesitant to countenance wars of preemption, though the war in Iraq was more a war of prevention, which Just War Theory specifically does not allow. Some scholars do believe that the U.S. could have been justified in deposing Saddam in the first Gulf War but that was then and by 2003, the immediacy of his threats had diminished and our claims that he was stockpiling WMDs were false. And here, I might reiterate: read a book. You will find no reputable Just War theorists arguing that Iraq was a just war. Or here: http://tinyurl.com/3x6cssj

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Posted on April 29 at 12:25 a.m.Suggest removal

Oh, hey college freshman, George Bush called, he wants his rhetoric back. I enjoy your support for completely unwarranted invasions and nation building. If, as you say, Iraq was a just war because it overthrew a tyrant that was oppressing and killing his people (though we were fine with this in the 80s when we were funding them to fight Iran. See the picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam), then we ought to overthrow the regimes of a host of countries around the world. Your idea opens up the door for crusades. The supermajority of scholars agree that the Iraq war was unjust and wrongfully started on false pretenses. Read a book.

Moreover, you think that the exhibit belittles what you have gone through as your dad was deployed oversees. Those combat boots represent a life that was taken for an unjust cause. They represent 19 and 20-year olds that won't have a chance to ever have a Christmas again with their family. More importantly, the exhibit serves to make the loss that our nation has suffered readily apparent to our generation, which quite frankly is apathetic and incubated from the war effort. When's the last time you saw Iraq discussed frequently on a news station?

Honoring the memory of those who have died in war by ensuring that they haven't been merely forgotten to history is not "infuriating" or "downright ridiculous." Rather, it is necessary in an age where the public is detached from the war effort unlike in Vietnam where you, or your brother or your classmate or best friend could be drafted at any moment.

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