NY Times article on Sarah PalinFollow

Like how you "sleeping" with all those women helps teach abstinence only?

I happen to disagree with you on this point. I just see it as part of a very rich cultural tapestry. Almost an aesthetic different in tastes. There's a lot of colours, shapes, and architectural styles I personally find ugly, but I'd be the first to admit that our culture would be infinitely poorer for only having the styles of buildings and things around that I like.

Using a swear-word is kind of like the verbal equivalent of a modern piece of abstract sculpture in neon pink, or the equivalent of fast food. Not everyone likes it. Some people think it's bad for you, or bad for your city environment. Some people find it so aesthetically awful it's offensive. (There's quite a number of people I know who harbour a repressed murderous hatred for the large yellow McDonald's arches which throng around every Australian suburb.) But what would life be like without burgers, and pizza? And there's such a fervent little artistic crowd who get all gooey over abstract art.

If I was a parent, the one thing I'd be concerned about is the vocabulary of my young child. One of the useful, and yet possibly slightly ruinous things about swearing is that swearwords are SO multi-purpose and eloquent of emotional punctuation. I noticed that when I was a teenager, and spent the years between the age of 14 and 22 not swearing at all on purpose, just so I developed my vocabluary while I was still doing English/Lit classes. So if I had a young child, probably up to the age of about 12 or 13, whenever they swore, I might repeat their sentence, substituting a different word for the swear word, so that they developed a wider vocabluary of adjectives and description words for things and emotions. Well, I might have that intention. I'm pretty sure a lot of intentions go out the window when you are hit with the actual reality of a live child.

I'm happy with myself as long as I treat people the way that I would wish to be treated myself. I don't like being hurt. If someone finds swearing hurtful, I don't swear around them.

This is a public message board, and it's got it's own rules. One of the reasons I frequent The Asylum and the OOT is that I'm allowed to swear in the Asylum, and The language in the OOT is relaxed and informal and I'm allowed to use swear-word substitutes there, like **** and sh*t.

This has been bugging me.

Religious zeal, even politically-tinged religious zeal, is more acceptable to me than religiously-tinged political zeal.

There. I had to say it.

Also we'r just past the 45th anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham bombing. I know the true believers here will slough off any mention of righteous anger still based in the Civil Rights movement ("it was so long ago! things have completely changed!"); but for the rest of us who would like to understand why someone old enough to remember these events would sill be angry and passionately concerned enough to have a love-hate relationship with this country, well, there it is.

The FBI dismissed the bombing for years, saying Civil Rights workers had bombed the church themselves in order to garner sympathy for their cause.

These sorts of accusations say so much about the accusers, don't they?

Scroll up a step, Tare.

Yes, because we all know Obama and Wright sat in the back room of the church planning out ways to bring down the white man for his misdeeds throughout the centuries.