Brilliant. Absolute genius. Except for the part that involves you voting for people who are doing everything in their power to prevent their shitty ideas from dying with the older generation, including making those same shitty ideas part of the legal landscape of this nation. But thank goodness they’re not punishing free speech while they’re screwing people who aren’t you.

On the latter let me give you a clearer example: when Wal Mart tried to build a store across the street from a school in my community people protested. Not wanting a Wal Mart across the street from a school wasn’t an attack on the corporation’s “right to free speech”. There were concerns that had nothing to do with any views Wal Mart or its executives might have expressed.

As for “The social issues will take care of themselves as the younger generations vote, and the older generations die”, if we all took that attitude there are a lot of places in this country that would still have segregated drinking fountains. But even if the “inevitability argument” is correct why make the current generation wait?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuYgmyorZrc

“The courts have so often made clear that giving money to a cause is protected speech. you may not like it, but it’s the law of the land.”

The fact that it is the law of the land makes it neither right nor just. Especially when that law comes about as the result of the powerful and the wealthy seeking to preserve their power and their wealth. This is not the protection of “unpopular ideas”. This is not a minority voice being defended against the tyranny of the majority. This is people who all ready control far too much of our society using the structure meant to support and defend the vulnerable among us as a bludgeon against anyone who challenges them.

septimar claims the Mayor is doing something out of order, or unlawful, but it just isn’t so. 

NO. I never said that a law’s existence made it morally correct. But there is a difference between morality and legality. I think capital punishment is immoral, but that doesn’t make it illegal. I don’t believe in natural law.

Why does it being legal suddenly make it not-terrorism??  You keep saying “by definition” (even though that’s patently false), and you provided a quote parroting what you keep repeating over and over and over, but you have yet to actually  explain why you believe that it isn’t terrorism.

My view of this article may be colored by the fact that I originally found it linked from an article on Popehat.
http://www.popehat.com/2012/07/20/eat-less-totalitarianism/

The “by definition” part is what gets me, because I provided the definition and it doesn’t imply what he’s saying at all.  He’s reading a lot into a really simple definition.

Because he is allowed to deny permits with discriminatory practices of the applicant as his reason for doing so.

I doubt CFA will take him up on that challenge.

Deliberately killing people IS murder and terrorism IS terrorism. If you are saying that it’s not murder and not terrorism because the state authorizes it, then you are the one destroying the meanings of words. In particular, states often support death squads. It can be hard to determine whether a given massacre was ordered from above or not [or for that matter, whether it was technically legal or not], and one would be left unable to say whether the massacre was terrorism or not.

CFA makes claims that it does not discriminate based on religion, creed, gender, sexual orientation, race, other stuff.

Yet there are myriad examples of them doing just that very thing. 

They want shitcake and they want to eat the shitcake.

In other words:  Freedom for me, but not for thee.

But really, I think corporate dystopias only happen with the help of governments, like in London right now.

Actually, I agree with this.  What I think it ignores is that states predate and underwrite the whole concept of corporations (not to mention private property) so that there is no way to have corporations without a state.  My chief criticism of libertarianism is only that libertarians ignore the way their ideas have fared in history (poorly).

I think the answer is to outlaw limited liability.  The owners of a company are responsible for what that company does.  This would resolve a lot of the corporate governance problems created by the disconnect between corporate ownership and control and help ensure that corporations are driven by the personal values of human beings so that profit-motive can stop overwhelming the public good.

It is a telling thing that people believe it is against the law to refuse someone employment for such reasons. It means society is moving forward when people associate the custom of tolerance with law. It means most people see it as unbeneficial to discriminate, according to most people.

I don’t care if some random quote is trying to make the argument that terrorism is not terrorism when it’s due to a law made by the government.

The thing is, this quote in NO WAY explains why state-sanctioned terrorism isn’t actually terrorism. It states that it is such, but it doesn’t explain why.

And I don’t buy it. It makes it entirely too easy for the government to avoid responsibility for terrorizing an entire group of people for being gay.

The courts have so often made clear that giving money to a cause is protected speech.

How many times did they actually make this clear?  Just once.  One controversial 5-4 ruling. 
It’s an interpretation of the law of the land, it’s not actually written into law anywhere that “money is protected speech.”
And it’s a huge problem.  Despite libertarian political theory, corporations do not have the best interests of human beings at heart. We should not let legal fictions have so much more say than living, breathing human beings about how our society is run.
Edit:
“interpretation” Yes, that’s how common law traditions work. Does that contradict the fact that if just one of the nine justices had voted the other way the ruling wouldn’t have been the way it was? Mordicai was onto something with “lawful evil” I think.
“Oh and btw, the ruling that protected corporate speech also protected unions, just fyi.”
The purpose of unions is to provide a countermeasure for the outsize power of corporations. If corporations didn’t have that kind of power unions wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. And since unions (like corporations) are a potent vector of corruption that would be a good thing.

If there is a law, it is capital punishment. If not, it’s murder.

These things are not mutually exclusive.  And I cannot believe I am about to Godwin this fucking thread, but do you not consider what Hitler and his followers dished out to be murder? Or rather, on a larger scale, genocide?

You do realize that’s crazy talk?

ineluctably political in aims and motives violent – or, equally important, threatens violence designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target conducted by an organization with an identifiable chain of command or conspiratorial cell structure

And oh no! Someone believes it *has* to be non state-sanctioned. And I should totally change my opinion because of that one quote!

How ’bout NO.

Are you really this dense? Or are you trolling us? Because wow.