TGO David

Just a note: I am working on a new Current Events and Politics forum. I may not get it finished for a few more hours as I'm chipping away at it between meetings and other tasks. It will be hidden behind the Benefactor pay wall. There will be an additional set of rules for participating. Ignorance of those rules will not be a valid excuse for not following them. Stay tuned.

Just a note: I am closing this thread for now. It will re-open soon. I am working on a new Current Events and Politics forum. I may not get it finished for a few more hours as I'm chipping away at it between meetings and other tasks. It will be hidden behind the Benefactor pay wall. There will be an additional set of rules for participating. Ignorance of those rules will not be a valid excuse for not following them. Stay tuned.

This is exactly why I have chosen, to this point, to leave this conversation open. I saw your private message urging me to close it down. You either want full-on moderation and suppression of thought and opinion, or you don't. We've tried walking the balance between the two and so far it's been a ####show.

@MacGyver, do you want to make any further statement about the recent banning? I thought it was pretty clear where the gentleman went over the line with constant racist / xenophobic statements and you seemed to address that in your previous post before he was banned, but maybe I'm just assuming too much.

You know how to solve that, right? Just leave. Say the word and I'll delete your account. It won't cause me to lose a moment of sleep.

AI TGO David looks really different, though. He's easy to spot.

Holy #### that's a jump right off the cliffs of Mt. Xenophobia and not at all what I said.

I thought I was going to take a break from this thread for a while, but here I am just wanting to make one appeal to you all that I hope crosses party lines and partisanship thinking: Carry your damned gun. Do not for a moment think that it is unfathomable that a militant extremist could walk into Main Street Yourtown, USA and start attacking innocent civilians. It has happened before in our country, and it is likely to happen again. You can either be a helpless spectator, a victim, or a first responder. Your choice.

There's a whole segment of American society that is willing to demonstrate the truth of FAFO if that ever really happens.

Dude, to hell with anyone who had any involvement in this. On any side. I don't need to be convinced that if you follow the money, it will lead you many dens of vipers. It doesn't matter who they are, they need to be brought out into the light of day and then be dealt with swiftly and severely. It feels like you're intent on making sure we know who's involved as if that will bring about some soothing moral equivalency that will ease the pain. The agony of a dad burying his child isn't diminished by knowing that his own government was somehow complicit or somehow made moves on the chess board decades ago that lead to this moment.

I'm keenly aware, thanks.

40 babies slaughtered by Hamas terrorists. Some reports I have read said that infants were found beheaded. Just something to keep in mind as we're having the unmitigated gall to armchair quarterback the response of people who are having to match up the severed heads of their infant children with the bodies so that they can bury them. I think I'm done participating in this thread for now. Going to go hug my kids and try not to go crazy thinking about how I need to protect them from this kind of #### in our world. If I were a father of a murdered child in Israel right now, I'm not sure anyone could talk to me about maintaining civility without it becoming uncivil.

What ideology are those children being raised to believe in? It's a hard question but you know it's one that has to be answered. Western society likes to believe that all kids the world-over are just cute little tykes playing with building blocks and watching Cocomelon on TV. That simply isn't true. Some of those kids have been robbed of their innocence and their childhood and have, by their own parents, already been turned into fanatics who would kill you if given the chance. It disgusts me that there are places in this world where children cannot just be children. Where they are taught to hate and to kill. There is most certainly a place in hell for the adults who turn them into that. This sort of #### is why some of my friends who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have debilitating PTSD. They have seen children commit atrocious war crimes and can't rid themselves of those memories. I don't have an answer for how this is handled cleanly. The only thing I can do is pray and ask God to save as many kids on both sides of the Israeli border walls as He can.

How is bombing the Gaza Strip back to the stone age any different than allied forces leveling Berlin and other towns and cities in Germany during WWII? Not all German people were Nazis any more than all Palestinians are Hamas, but the world apparently recognized the fact that eradicating cancer unfortunately comes with the pain of surgery and committed themselves to eradicating cancer. Look... I don't want collateral damage. I wish there were a clean way to deal with this. I'm not seeing one. What's your recommendation?

Here's where I am at with this: Who gunned down Israeli children in their beds and cribs, or hiding in safe rooms with their families? Who gunned down Israeli concert-goers as they scattered looking for a safe direction to run? Who captured, raped, beat, and killed Israeli women of all ages? Who knocked on doors in residential areas and gunned down the Israeli citizens who naively opened the door to see who was there? Find the people who did that. Find the people who financed it. Find the people who planned it. Find the people who knew about it in advance, remained silent, and allowed it to happen. And then end them. All of them. I don't care to sort out agendas or to play 4D Chess. If someone was involved, they need to go. I don't care what side of the argument they were on.

My wife reminds me all the time, especially when dealing with my trouble-making neighbors as a representative of the HOA board (a mistake I will never make again), that I spend too much time trying to bring people around to my way of thinking. I believe that she's right. I've spent too much time doing that in this very thread. My opinion, therefore, is that Israel should unleash hell on Palestine and Iran and forever change the map of the Middle East. If this accelerates the end of the world, then come quickly Lord Jesus.

Fortunately, there's a map that explains everything!

Is that the only map we're allowed to use, or can we go even further back... centuries back... to see who had claim to the land before? Over the course of its history, Palestine has been owned by Ancient Egypt, Ancient Israel, Judah, the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, several Muslim Caliphates, the Ottoman Empire, and then finally the United Kingdom before it was divided in 1948 between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Ownership of the dirt beneath Israel has been hotly contested practically since the beginning of human civilization. It has always been a crossroads for commerce, culture, and religion, and a slew of kingdoms and governments have had laid claim to it over the centuries. You'll note that Ancient Israel is in that list and their claim to the land began somewhere around 1200 years before the birth of Christ. So, if we're just comparing receipts, they've got a pretty old claim to that dirt and it's not just circa 1948.

Oh, and I forgot... moderators are people too and get to have opinions, Karen.

I think Israel should wipe Hamas off the map but it's hard (impossible?) to kill an ideology. At best they'll just kick the can down the road by killing a generation, but they'll create a whole new generation of zealots who are seething with an even more intense fire by doing so. This all feels like armchair quarterbacking, though. Spectator sport. What worries me is that the same people who hate Israel hate America and I really don't care what their reasons are or whether we or Israel have it coming. The reality is that governments have it coming and that citizens are collateral damage. I don't want my kids to be someone else's collateral damage. That said, I'm pretty convinced this #### is coming to an America near you at some future point in time. I hope I am wrong, but if it does, it's going to be all of our problem in a much more real way than bickering about it on the Internet.

I really feel that trying to moderate political threads on TGO is like trying to pick up a turd by the clean end. It can't be done. I also feel that forbidding discussion of political things is a similar proposition. Politics are so intertwined with firearms and firearms ownership that people drawn to guns and gun forums will also always be drawn to talking about political topics. Even if the topics seemingly have nothing to do with guns. At a fundamental level, all political topics involve force or the threat of force once you start making laws. Instituting a law requires the threat of repercussions if the law isn't obeyed. The government's answer to the question, "Or else - what?" always has been that they will use force to remove you from public or even the gene pool if you fail to comply. We could try [again] to forbid anything political being discussed on TGO, but that also means people won't be allowed to talk about current events. This doesn't appeal to me. Or I could just tell people to grow the #### up and be ready to receive it if you dish it out and see who's left standing. I swear, though. The absolute intolerance of other opinions makes me think some of y'all pee sitting down.

Does the apartment I have inside your head rent-free also come with furniture??

You know, I am honestly approaching the point where making people behave here is wearing thin with me. We get dangerously close to me just telling you all to have at it and seeing if you can really survive open discourse when you pick at "the other side" with bait memes like this.

Hey gang, just a quick vote of confidence for the seller @Booms225. I know he's new to TGO but he is also a personal friend of mine and is completely squared away. You can have confidence in him as a seller.

Hey gang, just a quick vote of confidence for the seller @Booms225. I know he's new to TGO but he is also a personal friend of mine and is completely squared away. You can have confidence in him as a seller.