In my former career as an English teacher, I found that one of the hardest things to teach wasn't using quotations/citations, but getting my 15-year-olds to select relevant citations and then explain the relevance to their thesis. They only got it through constant practice (i.e. writing lots of papers for me) and criticism/correction (both from me and their peers)...

[Perhaps the most head-smackingest moment came when a student argued in a paper on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that Antony was Brutus' friend because he kept saying that "Brutus is an honorable man" in his funeral speech, and why would you say nice things about someone you hated? This after a whole lesson and discussion on the use of verbal irony in the context of that exact speech.]

Anyway, I suspect that if your brother-in-law didn't learn how to find and explain relevant support for his arguments in school, he's never going to learn it... good luck!

The Spectacle. We are the society of it.

...but a titled Rothschild! Irony ain't just dead - now they're f*cking its corpse.

It's State Capitalism, which forces everyone to become an investor whether they like it or not.

When somebody actually proposes worker control of the econonyr, then you can talk about Socialism.

Right now, this is about millionaire politicians using the power of the State to save the asses of millionaire citizens.

You have your definition of socialism, and I have mine, which is based on history.

Socialism, at its core, means workers control the economy to meet human needs. In the later 19th century, some socialists decided that state power could be used to bring such a society about and they formed political parties, taking the moniker "Socialist" for themselves, while other socialists (now called anarchists) thought that such an approach (using the state) wouldn't work and would simply replace the bourgeoisie ruling class with a bureaucratic ruling class.

Since then, the word socialist has become a bogey-man to scare people away from all state interference of the economy in addition to the unlikely possibility of a worker-controlled. If it was meant to be taken seriously, it would mean that all economies everywhere in all of history are/were socialist, even the U.S. during the "laissez-faire" period.

If they didn't, they couldn't operate. If you don't want a government that can tax or spend, then you don't want government, period. That's a fine position to have, but I really doubt that John McCain and the GOP are actually anarchists.

No - if you believe that people need a state and government, they you have to accept that people will have pay for it through taxation. It's just a question of who's taxed, how much, and on what to spend those taxes.

Republicans rely on this "Tax & Spend Liberal" trope because they don't want people look at who they want to tax (middle class and working poor), how much they want to tax them (the middle-class and working poor proportionally more than the rich), and what they want to spend it on (defense boondoggles for their contractor friends and families, i.e. themselves).

Sorry for the slightly off-topic, but:

The End Times theology of these particular "evangelicals" relies on a completely a-literal reading of Bible, their protestations otherwise notwithstanding.

To believe in the PMD End Times scenarios requires one to believe that Jesus - who is God - was wrong when he said he'd return before the end of his Apostle's lifetimes. It requires one to believe that when John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelations in Greek and address it to the Church in Turkey, he really intended it for an audience speaking a language that didn't yet exists, in a country that didn't yet exist, 2,000 years later. It requires one to wrench out of context Bible phrases, half-phrases, and prophecies already fulfilled in the very Books in which they appear and then turn their actual, literal meanings on their heads to create arrive at a "literal" interpretation which is then applied to current affairs.

Fred Clark (slacktivist.typepad.com), journalist and evangelical Baptist, uses the Bible itself to thoroughly demolishe this theology as perverse and un-Christian (if not anti-Christian) on his Left Behind blog.

Another fun activity (fun for me anyway), is to watch the Jack Van Impe Show with Bible in hand and note all of the passages he cites to support his argument that we are living in the Last Days. (He'll fire out two or three dozen passages a minute, so you won't be able to keep up with the whole show.) Then read those passages in context and you'll find that they have nothing to do with the End of Days and everything to do with the days in which they were written.

So next time some so-called fundamentalist so-called evangelical so-called Christian tells you that their End Times hokum is the "literal" Word of God tell them that no one knows the hour of His coming and that they should spend less time evangelizing the End of Days and more time living Christlike lives.

It's time moderate religionists stop fetishising these people and take them for what they are: heretics.