Joey Vento Is Right, This Is America, Speak English

I havent made anything up. I didnt change what the sign said at all. So i left off the part that says "this is America."(which is simply a statement of fact and not the controversial part anyway). I got tired of writing out the whole thing time and again because i think at this point in the conversation we all know what the sign says. I even quoted the sign verbatim earlier on in the discussion. It doesnt change the point at all anyway so i dont see why you even brought it up.

You are the one reading implied meanings into the sign and comparing it to things like "No Blacks Allowed," when there is a clear distinction between the two.

Again you made an issue out of an insignificant portion of my post while ignoring all of my pointed questions. Before you post again, why dont you go back and read my posts. Notice the questions? Yeah, they were for you.
I have tried to respond to all of your arguments with my own, but you only respond to portions of my statements which you then attempt to spin to somehow support your position. You have continually misquoted me and made claims that i have said things that in fact i didnt say.
You are the one making things up.

 

Wow, that's unreal.

What questions do you want me to answer, hm?

 

Vento is Italian. His parents emigrated from Italy. If someone came to Genos and they only spoke Italian, would they see Vento as racist because of the sign? (Probably not because they wouldn't be able to read the sign anyway... but I digress.)

This is such a silly argument, and to somehow attribute the sign with racism is a sure sign of the brainwashed, Sovietized system many of us have been conditioned by.

 

No, he'd probably take their order in Italian and ignore his own store policy.

What is the point of putting up the sign if everyone who can't read English won't be able to read it, hm? Is it possible that it's a sick joke to make fun of people who can't read English? Gee, I wonder.

 

Or maybe it's just a statement against overt state-mandated political correctness, where everyone has to live in fear over possibly "offending" someone and being demonized because of it, just like in the former Soviet Union.

 

Where is there any evidence that the state is over mandating political correctness in his case? He is a self employed individual who purposefully mixes up his customers' orders when he cannot understand their speech.

 

Oh really? I highly doubt, being the owner of a world-renouned cheesesteak joint, that he takes the orders himself. I could be wrong, though.

Even if that was true, it has nothing to do with what's being discussed here, which is the sign and the ordering of the sign to be taken down. See, you keep wanting to cloud the issue with all this other stuff that really isn't relevant to the discussion.

But it's a silly discussion, and the fact that it has dragged on this long baffles me. I've already said what I wanted to say. I am not going to keep repeating myself. It's pointless.

 

Yeah, I still have more to say about the American Constitution, but I don't really feel like dragging it all out into this one thread.

The issues are: Is his sign offensive? How much or how little? And is it unconstitutional to force him to take it down?

I think I've made it clear where I stand to answer those questions. I don't think it's wrong to question the surrounding issues as to why he put the sign up in the first place; in fact that is a part of the issue and the circumstances surrounding the message of what is written on the sign is something that the Supreme Court had to take into consideration before making a decision - so it's worth a talk through, IMO.

 

I agree with this statement 100%.

 

Well, I don't think it's fair to demonize my opinions as a Stalinist, a Communist, or a Soviet Unionist. Some of my ideas may seem crazy, but they are far from any extremisms and tyrannical vantages.

It's not my fault if you feel threatened by my views and decide to discredit them by giving them a label by calling me a Communist.

After all, I am criticizing the very characteristics that bestows Americans with their sense of distinctiveness and their principled virtues on liberty, freedom, life and pursuit of personal happiness, etc.

But it is fair to assume that any and every Constitution isn't perfect, and the American is no exception. I just have a difference of opinion when it comes to limiting certain personal freedoms. Nothing Stalinist about that, that's the very reason why we have Constitutions to begin with, to limit either the power from the British Crown and the Loyalist aristocrats, or to makes sure that there are equal limits of power for everyone under its protection.

*shrugs*

I don't live in fear of offending someone, and I don't see how this would make people afraid in anyway if Mr. Vento had been required to remove his sign. It's a matter of context. People should have little restraint on their personal freedoms however there are circumstances when a necessary limitation to those personal freedoms should be curtailed if it infringes upon the race, gender, or ethnic origins of a specific group that are based on views of a discriminatory nature.

And that's how I perceive this case.

 

I never said you were a communist or a Stalinist, nor did I even imply that. That's you putting words in my mouth.

However, the current system in the West was adopted from the Soviet system and that's a fact. That includes the politically correct, tattle tale, nanny state society we live in today, where everyone is hypersensitive over offending somebody out of fear they'll be labeled racist, intolerant, dangerous, mentally ill or whatever, for having their own peculiar beliefs.

I personally believe in treating others with respect, but when you go looking to big brother to solve all of society's ills, you are voluntarily placing an enormous amount of power into their hands, which they always end up using against the people's best interests. It's important to know that political correctness isn't pushed like it is via public education and the media because those at the top care about you hurting other people's feelings. It's used to squash all free speech and dissent in general.

 

Forced tolerance is not true tolerance. I believe people should be good to others as a matter of personal responsibility and a desire to do good in the world. I dont believe people should be forced to by the government. Why does it have to be a legal issue if he puts up an offensive sign. It causes no harm to anyone's person or property. In a free market democratic society, we have ways to deal with businesses we have problems with: the right to protest and boycott. If you dont like what the man is doing, dont give him any business. I see no real need for the government to get involved in this issue.

 

No, the current system is a Classical Liberalist/Classical Conservatist mixed base with Reformed aspects of Social Democracy.

It's not an adopted Soviet system, and it's not a fact.

Democracy in itself is a technique, a way of making certain decisions by accepting the will of the majority. The most basic conceptual problem today is that the two dimensions of the "how" and the "who" of government have become blurred in the single term democracy.

Its current usage suggests not only majority rule but also a condition of freedom in which a limited state respects people's rights. Freedom of Speech, religion, ethnicity and so on are commonly identified as democratic liberties, though they aren't necessarily found in a democracy.

Western democracy and its universal acceptance stems only from the years of the World War I, which was fought, in the famous words of the American president Woodrow Wilson, "to make the world safer for democracy." Opinions have been divided and skeptical about democracy throughout the 19th century; and before then, almost everyone who had ever written anything on politics was highly reluctant to accept claim to have a democratic system and were in favour of aristocratic and monarchistic systems of government rule. But the push came after WWI.

It is out of this idea that democracy becomes a legitimate form of government only when it is united with the traditional Western ideals of constitutionalism, rule of law, liberty under law, and the limited state that made up for Liberal Democracy to build up in Canada and the United States and made it possible for freedoms to become maximized. The idea was to minimize arbitrary coercion and maximize universal submission to equal laws through the rule of law and governance thereof.

But it was Aristotle who saw, that rule of the many, may or may not be lawful.

Specifically, a majority might take away the property, language, or religious rights of a minority unless the majority itself is restrained by the constitution.

Democracy requires freedom only in the limited and partial sense that a certain amount of political freedom is necessary if the people are to choose officials: they must have a chance to nominate candidates, discuss the issues, cast ballots, and so on. But beyond this necessary minimum, democracy in other realms of life could be quite oppressive.

For example, in the southern United States white employers sometimes refused to hire blacks. And in Canada, employers have sometimes refused to hire Aboriginal people. In most democratic societies today, the definition of democracy includes the assumption that all individuals have an equal legal right to be considered for employment.

It's democracy blurring and confusing the lines of all Western values with values like equality of opportunity, egalitarianism, and the more moderate forms of socialism we call Social Democracy.

EDIT: It is what Plato and Aristotle meant by the polity; a system like 'constitutional democracy' of which the majority chooses rulers, who must then govern within the rule of law, without distinguishing the redistrubution of power, social justice, government intervention and laissez faire economics.

Hell, majority rule is the normal working principle of decision-making in democracies, so it's only natural for most people to defend the values of a liberal form of democracy, when something like an offensive sign to lingual minorities in a restaurant window is criticized as being intolerant to the very rights and freedoms that all people should be equally protected from any and all forms of discrimination of the ruling majority.

 

Is that what you learned yourself or what you were told?

 

Please, I don't wish to hear the authorized version of history. I already learned all that in high school.

 

Here Here

I have encountered countless examples of this, and deep down the true bias always comes out sooner or later.

 

Well please, tell me your unauthorized version of history of Western Democracies.

I don't mean to bore you. We can stop this all right here if you want too, because I don't really care anymore to be told that my views are not my own or that I'm small minded because of my learning.

We have differing views, and not all of mine are authorized or learned through the subjects that they teach at my school(s). Hell, I study French literature mainly. I learn how to conjugate the səb-jŭngk'tĭv, analyze Maupassant's novellas and write poems in Louisiana Créole.

I would love to hear what you have learned, dear. I'm a sponge!

 

I already explained to you the reason it wasnt discrimination. It doesnt exclude anyone like a sign that read "No Foreigners Allowed" would. Read the Civil Rights act. We do have laws against discrimination in this country, but this case doesnt fit the definitions for discrimination. Otherwise the sign would have been taken down. He was simply making a statement, which is not illegal, whether you Find it offensive or not. I wouldnt put that sign up at my place of business, but i will defend his right to put one up at his.

 

We live under the illusion of democracy. That illusion is based on the notion we can go to the polls every two and four years to vote for the candidates THEY give us. The fact is, the US is not a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be. Democracy is one of the absolute WORST forms of government. Democracy translates to "mob rule" in Greek. The US was founded as a constitutional republic, though from an early age children are conditioned via the public school system to believe that we live in a democracy when that isn't the case.

The fact is, this isn't a republic or a democracy. It is a neo-feudalist system. Mussolini said corporatism would be better defined as FASCISM, since it is the merger of the corporation and the state. That is what we have today across the West. The politicians are not working for the people who supposedly put them in office, they are working for their bosses, which are the transnational corporations and international bankers, who work through unelected bureaucracies and non-governmental organizations (NGO's). They are the ones calling the shots, not the puppet politicians we elect thinking they are working for us.

So what we see under this system is the merging of supercapitalism and communism. This is the dialectic. The resulting synthesis is a system that is not fully capitalist and not fully communist. It is a form of socialism, which would be more adequately referred to as "the third way", also sometimes referred to as communitarianism.

 

What do you know about Dr. Etzioni?

Apparently, this person is the founder of communitarianism.