every liberal needs every thing handed to them and done the way they want

Liberals are now just cry baby culture

libtard be like WAAAAH when i compare him to stalin xDDDD

You seem triggered by us, maybe you should deal with it quietly and shut up.

And yet here you are repeatedly commenting and finger-pointing at people you don't know outside of IMGFLIP. LOL

If you’re being a racist in public I will call you a racist

Better you learn here than in the real world when it could cost you your job

And if you're being an ignorant, whiny ass, there are many who will call you out in it. And you better learn that before leaving the safety zone of a comment thread and going out into the real world. It could cost you the desire to go out and actually work.

eyyy to claim moral high ground over snarky bernie fans, let's send them hospitalized.

nah - just putting them in their place.
https://twitter.com/Calloutfortruth/status/1166065815713501185

That's why those beta boys ANTIFA, never show up at a Trump rally and try to fight them. They show up, but only in heavy liberal states/cities. They won't dare come to a conservative state or even a swing state. I WISH they would show up here in Texas especially here in Houston. They will get f**ked up, not just by Trump supporters but in general. Let them come here and fly a soviet union flag or burn a flag or try to destruct the town.

For one, no bullshit, the cops would back you up if you shot them all if they started a violent riot like they did in California. I asked a cop what if he pulls me over and sees and locked and loaded gun? He literally told me he'd say "nice gun". But of course they would check to see if it was stolen, and he even told me if I were defending my life or myself and I had to use a gun, shoot to kill and don't shoot them in the knee or w.e. LOL the irony.... But even then, these Texas cops would f**k them up to. Anyways, Liberals are just a bunch of keyboard warriors, but they no better not to step up to conservatives.

Last time Democrats tried to step up to Republicans, it didn't work out to well for them.

I work

I have defended company managers and employees accused of racism, sexism, disability discrimination and sexual harassment in court

Usually I was able to get them off, occasionally needing to pay a hefty settlement

Even if the employee accused of discrimination “won,” several were forcibly exited by their employers afterwards for costing their company too much in legal fees

I promise you: it is easier to just avoid all of this by being respectful

I am sure you will remember your own advice then, right?

I don’t follow, I am plenty respectful

But you or I can call anyone an idiot all day, that doesn’t break any laws

If I'm not then you most certainly are not.

I disagree that I’m disrespectful — but ultimately your opinion on whether I’m being respectful is not all that important.

Free speech does give me the right to run around ImgFlip telling people not to be racist bigots using whatever tone I choose

What you call "tacit admissions," I call just playing along with you for a little bit.

I'm well aware ImgFlip is a private company and it doesn't owe anyone a platform. (I've made that point elsewhere many times). But they're not going to censor me because they don't even censor purgey memes. ImgFlip's editorial viewpoint is heavily slanted toward the "free speech absolutist" end of the spectrum. (the auto-censoring of words like f**k and rape aside). Most people here like it that way.

That's fine -- again, I believe hate speech should be *allowed* but not *celebrated* -- but I don't think the site needs to tolerate the worst hate speech (death threats) which is essentially what a lot of purgey's memes and comments amount to.

Despite your latest pedantic "unpacking" of every latent interpretation in my words, we don't truly disagree on much here.

typical liberal. if you have a different opinion you are a racist in their eyes. is that all you people can come up with?

Cause G-L-B will make vagabond souffle look like a saint

Your shaking FROM the detoxing
( d.t.'s ) Don't worry just got to drink more to get rid of that

Oh you wished. But guess again if you think I post that on here. You DEFINITELY got THAT f**ked up asshole

Says the furtard 1972

Just a guy with opinions that I share online, same as you.

I’ve had the chance to learn from people who know a lot more about the race subject than I do

I’ll do a meme soon with some discrete examples of things I’d consider racist so we can have something tangible to debate

No, Obama did nothing to invite the “Birther” inquiries. All of these “questions” about his origin are not legitimate — and whether racist or not l, they are certainly at least bigoted.

Obama has said multiple times he is a Christian. He has written about his Christian beliefs in his memoirs. You will probably deny that he is a Christian based on your own incredibly restrictive definition of what it means to be a “true” Christian.

However there is a total lack of evidence he’s a Muslim. He has never said he is a Muslim. It is not “debatable” that he is a closet Muslim. Your suggestions that it is are bigoted.

Not only is your purported definition of racism way too restrictive to be of any use, you’ve put your own bigotry on full display for us.

Describing people’s skin color is not racist

Describing people’s skin color and implying something bad about it is

And those Indonesians you talked about (yes, I knew Indonesia was the largest Muslim country) — many of them are of a dark complexion.

Islam is common in the “global south” where the population has more melanin.

I haven’t said or implied anything bad about Muslims; you have.

It was a dumb “question” from the get-go and would have never been asked of any white candidate. Obama had no obligation to play along with this dumb nonsense.

Trump rose to political prominence thanks to people who believed this crap. And some still do.

Citation needed for the concept Hillary “started this.” Even if true, which I doubt, no one pushed it harder than Trump. And this birther garbage established him early as the most racist candidate in the 2016 GOP field. How did that work out for him? Oh yeah: he won.

Part of what I’m trying to change!

wtf? that was completely hypocritical! god how stupid can you people get?

A lot of the same idiots who backed birtherism "questioned" McCain's Panama canal zone birth. But these were not pursued with nearly the same level vigor and shelf-life that birtherism against Obama was pursued.

I don't know about Chester A. Arthur, but I note that the U.S. government at this time, and for many decades after, was allowing states and private businesses to implement Jim Crow so it is weird to offer this as a defense to racism. All I think it really shows is that spurious attacks on presidential candidates' credentials have been pursued since Day 1 of our country: and certainly, at least since the election of 1800 when rumors (racial and otherwise) dogged both the Adams and Jefferson campaigns:

--Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."' Transphobic much?

--In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." Racist much?

On that note, here's another interesting quote: In 1798, George Washington complained "that you could as soon scrub the blackamoor white, as to change the principles of a professed Democrat; and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country." Our Founding Father-in-Chief, despite his allegedly non-partisan credentials, was not above casually racist banter and reflexive partisanship toward the opposing party. This soundbite could be lifted straight from the mouths of Trumpists today.

No. Trump's experience in the celebrity limelight, his stints on his reality show, and his failed presidential run in 2000 do not amount to "political prominence." Many celebrities in the U.S. have run for president and other political offices. The vast majority have failed. Trump only succeeded in '16 thanks to the unique brand of politics he was offering compared to his GOP rivals, which included a heavy dose of... ahem... "direct" speech on race.

Beliefs and political attitudes are fair game for ridicule all day. All I have to do is look around the "politics" stream on any given day and see liberal folks getting attacked and ridiculed all day. So you can't really take the high road when I fire back a bit and "denigrate conservatives."

But this does not bother me in the slightest. Politics is a rough-and-tumble sport. If you can't handle the heat, then get out of the kitchen.

But what I find deeply offensive and wrong, and what can readily get you fired in the real world, is this: attacking people on the basis of their personal characteristics: race, sex, sexuality, disability, etc. This has nothing to do with how people think and instead directly goes to who they are. It is an attack on their humanity.

And if the target of such language gets upset in response, it is not really their fault. It is the aggressor's fault for insulting them in the first place.

You guys understand this principle perfectly well when it comes to guns: If someone shoots at you, then you have the right to shoot back. But the person who fired the first shot was in the wrong.

"You guys" is my own shorthand for conservatives, since that's by and large who visits the politics stream. I pretty much always make it clear from context who I'm talking about.

No, you don't get to demand inordinate levels of respect from me when I participate in political debate, while permitting right-wingers to flay liberals endlessly without comment. I haven't seen you chastise a single right-winger for going overboard. I'm more than happy to chastise a Leftie for going overboard. See: imgflip.com/i/3jsue1

The OP meme in its invocation of triggered liberals is absolutely impliedly referencing "politically correct culture" which I take to be shorthand for conservative dissatisfaction about liberal discourse on race, sex, disability, and similar personal identity subjects. My rhetorical move was not an unjustified pivot whatsoever.

Enjoy your shit filled stocking this Christmas

I don't really care what the Bible says as far as that goes. The reason for that is not ignorance, but because I've demonstrated by quoting multiple passages of the Bible that whole a lot of the Bible is simply irrelevant to contemporary Christian practices and beliefs. Even you basically said this, when you drew a hard distinction between the Old and New Testaments and dismissed the Old Testament as "Judaism." You cannot gain a clear picture of a religion by simply reading its Holy Text. You have to examine current practices and beliefs and which parts of that Holy Text were ultimately emphasized.

If someone calls themselves a Christian, then I repeat that they are a Christian as far as the world is concerned. And I would say the same about adherents of any religion, unless there is solid evidence that the person claiming that religion is doing so with the intent of trolling and subverting it.

Finally, you can be bigoted in all sorts of other ways without being racist. There's also colorist (different than racist!), sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and more. All except maybe colorist are attitudes I've encountered to one degree or another while on ImgFlip. And in your case, I would say I've seen enough to conclude that you are somewhat Islamophobic.

I'm less interested in religion because I simply don't believe it affects the world as much as politics and other factors.

I don't think any of this proves Islam itself is a danger. The Islamic world was a forerunner in science, and certainly outpaced Europe in scientific innovation, during the Middle Ages. (I don't know if it was more advanced overall than China or India, but it was certainly in contact with and exchanged ideas with those places). The Middle East was a wealthier and more diverse and tolerant place to live than Europe during the "Dark Ages." The Christian world was backwards, fragmented, and its leaders spent a lot of time persecuting Jews and heretics.

Then Europe suddenly came into its own during the Age of Enlightenment, and basically conquered the world either literally by force or through the spread of ideas and innovation.

Really complex ideas and a sweeping view of history but I am simplifying and compressing for the sake of brevity.

These days, much of the Islamic world is politically and religiously divided (Sunni/Shia and other sects), and parochial, backward-looking, and overly dependent upon oil. But certain majority-Islamic countries (e.g. Indonesia, Oman, Tunisia) are better, more dynamic, tolerant, and peaceful places to live than others (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Libya).

How do we know that the rise of Europe and the relative decline of the Middle East is due primarily to religion and not other complex political factors?

Obama said he was Christian publicly and several times in his writings. He attended church. The fact that Obama had an African father and spent time overseas are not "evidence" of secret Muslim beliefs. Plenty of Christians are from Africa and plenty of Christians have otherwise traveled the globe. These are not even scintillas of "evidence." And whatever Obama's father believed or didn't believe about God, it's simply a fallacy to impute his religious beliefs to his son. Again, not evidence.

But even if you want to classify these factoids as "scintillas" of evidence rather than "no evidence at all" as I do, they plainly do not support the sustained birtherism campaign waged by Trump and others against Obama.

The fact that no one attacked Michelle in exactly the same terms as her husband is also not evidence of anything. I've seen plenty of bog-standard racist and even transphobic attacks against Michelle.

Obama spent as much time overseas as many Christian missionaries and their children spend overseas. It actually appears he attended a Catholic school in Indonesia from '68 to '69 (1st, 2nd, part of 3rd grade). Later he attended an Indonesian public school from '70-'71 (4th and 5th grade). Where is the evidence he attended a "Muslim" school? I don't see evidence he attended a Madrasa or other Islamic-oriented school. He moved back to Hawaii in mid-'71 and from 5th-12th grade attended a private high school in the states (Punahou School).

Pointing out the fact he attended public school for 2 years in a majority-Muslim country is perhaps better evidence of latent Islamic beliefs than anything else you've offered so far, but I'd still put it in the "scintilla" category when Obama spent the vast majority of his childhood education in an overseas Catholic school, or a private school in the states. And there's all this other evidence on that he was a Christian in his adult life.

However Obama chose to handle the "birther" attacks, the birthers here were in the wrong factually and so I focus my attention on them.

As for Michelle, I'm thinking in particular of a meme I saw which supposedly revealed a "bulge" in Michelle Obama's crotch area and asked questions about it. I feel confident calling that one transphobic. Ridiculing a woman's "masculine" features isn't automatically transphobic, but that one for sure was, and I've seen other memes stating she is a man in disguise or gender-confused.

It's still transphobic even if Michelle isn't trans herself, because it creates an atmosphere of hostility toward trans people and/or imply being trans is a bad or shameful thing.

Apart from Michelle, here's plenty of transphobic or borderline-transphobic content here on ImgFlip, and one of them hit #1 on "fun" earlier today and appears to be #2 now. imgflip.com/i/3k7b51

Re: Race on "birtherism." So far in this conversation: I'm speculating, you're speculating. You know what would help? A study.

"Political scientist Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College examined the effects of race and racial attitudes on birtherism in a 2014 paper. He concluded that belief in birtherism 'is almost completely resistant to factual correction and is strongly related [to] partisanship and attitudes about race.'

"To evaluate this, Klinkner conducted a survey of Americans asking them about their views on Obama’s birthplace. He then compared the answers to other factors, such as political party, race, and racial attitudes. He found that birthers are almost entirely white, are mostly Republican, and reported high levels of racial resentment.

"In fact, a stronger belief in birtherism correlated tightly with increasing levels of racial resentment."

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/29/16713664/trump-obama-birth-certificate

This backs up my suspicions and has pried back open that nail you supposedly put in that coffin. Got anything against this? (Spoiler: I know you will!)

Obama is our country's first black president ever. It is deeply weird to characterize his election, and only his election, a product of racism when every other president in our history has been white.

Blacks are roughly 13% of the population of America. All other things being equal, we should have expected about 13% of our presidents to have been black by this point in our history. We have had 45 presidents. 13% of 45 is a little under 6 presidents.

One good reason that didn't happen -- Blacks were enslaved for much of our history, and didn't have full political and voting rights everywhere in our country until the 1960's. That history has something to do with the lack of political representation of blacks at our highest levels of government, too.

All you're really showing with these wonderful statistics is that racial divides disadvantage groups all over the globe, not just in America

The "persistent falsehoods" about birtherism was not the topic he was investigating. The study is not a deep-dive into that question - it's neither necessary or interesting to do so, because among other things, "birtherism" has been debunked elsewhere. (The background section of the paper does acknowledge how fact-checking sites debunked it). "Birtherism" is simply not and was never a reality-based inquiry despite your continual efforts to paint it as such.

Rather, the study was about investigating the attitudes of the people who held those beliefs. So no, his study did not begin with his conclusion already in mind by simply acknowledging upfront the fact that he was investigating the attitudes of those who subscribed to these "persistent falsehoods."

This is not hard science. However, your own objections with the phrasing of two words in an opening paragraph of a study does not disqualify it from being a study. Once again, you are incredibly quick to find any reason to dismiss any perspective that might be described as "left" as a product of partisan bias.

"Birtherism" is simply quick, easy, and accurate shorthand for the conspiracy-minded movement questioning aspects of Obama's origin (and I see no reason to exclude the conspiratorial questions about his religion from this, either -- no, I'm not being "sloppy" in that regard). Again your objections to the fact that the phrase "birther" caught on and stuck is not very persuasive. If the phrase has acquired negative connotations, could that be because the movement itself is negative and not because Leftists succeeded in brainwashing everyone into thinking it was negative?

Bottom-line: You are demanding inordinate levels of respect, deference, and epistemological caution toward a conspiracy theory, while simultaneously applying ridiculous levels of scrutiny to a reality-based study.

I'm not sure how you've been here 6 years and don't know who "purgey" is. He posts all the time in the "politics" stream under various alts. Don't know how long he's been doing it, but I became aware of him a few weeks ago. Of course, it is difficult to decipher intent and he might "just be trolling us" (whatever that means), but I've concluded by applying Occam's Razor that he is most likely a bona fide Neo-Nazi.

I won't re-post his memes here but feel free to follow the link to my meme here where I called for him to be banned or at least for the mods to do a better job policing his memes: imgflip.com/i/3jwwft

In this link I gave more links to some of his memes. The worst (probably) was one that implied Jews belong in the oven. But: plenty of other hateful violent stuff of varying degrees to have a good ol' free speech battle about.

I even got into a very short back-and-forth with him which was mostly just ridiculous. But, I worry about how his memes normalize violent threats and all the upvotes some of his memes get.

Prosecutors are allowed to charge "hate crimes" on top of normal crimes as a sentence-enhancer so I do think "hate speech" is recognized under U.S. law to some degree. But as I understand it, you can't charge a "hate crime" all by itself unless there is an underlying assault, battery, or murder. And I think that is how it should be.

Our equal-opportunity employment laws ban discrimination in the workplace. That can be considered a civil rather than criminal prohibition on "hate speech."