I could understand wanting to express that it struck a nerve especially if asked about it. But it seems that if it is really something you didn't want to dissuade people from doing based on your principles, profession, or in the name of comedy...then why the talks about pop culture and women and hiding? Wouldn't you just say "yeah those were some zingers that stung, but that is comedy and I love comedy too much to hate on this form of it" and leave it at that?

Instead it seems like the follow up discussion is a way of saying "making fun of women's ages can be a sort of oppression and it's sad...I mean I'm not saying don't do it cause I would NEVER say that, I just think it's a shame pop culture does that." Which is essentially speaking out against it without having to actually make a stand against it?

btw I have nothing against SS and if these jokes weren't about another comedian I totally get it, but when it comes to comedians and comedy I've come to expect them to have an "all's fair and we should embrace that" kind of attitude about comedy...otherwise who gets to decide which shades of grey are allowed within the profession?

Not to defend the study which could be flawed as any study (and many are) but your analysis ignored a part that they did emphasize in this and the original experiment with children...strangeness.

They're not at home and they introduce the aspect of a stranger intentionally to play on the social constructs that we as humans use and are thus trying to understand in the animals we keep as pets.

Being in a foreign environment with strangers present is an automatic trigger for social animals (even adult humans will tend to cling to a familiar face at a foreign social gathering) and so if that social connection exists in a similar way between cats and humans one would hope to see it manifest itself as well.

I imagine if you did this with kittens and their mothers or vice versa you would likely see the results they were looking for. Which would beg the question: how different is the relationship between the cat family and the relationship of that cat to its human owner?

In the end I don't think people are arguing that cats don't care at all but instead when compared to the relationship between human/human and human/dog perhaps it is just not the same.

Would you argue that a horse, bird, fish, or snake can "love" a human as deeply as a cat? I've seen all of those show affection towards human owners. If not then what is the scale with which we measure an animals affinity for us relative to each other if not their intense desire to associate with us specifically as their owner?

I also find it interesting that I can't recall hearing cat owners point out a showing of affection by cats that we don't find in dogs although I HAVE heard of uniquely cat methods of revenge (jaws and claws being equal I've never heard of dogs using table tops to terrify cell phones and other treasured human items). So you could almost argue that if cats don't love humans more than dogs they may dislike us more than dogs in their efforts to devise methods of inflicting pain on us.

I'd also like to point out on a personal note that even in an adult human, if I took them somewhere and they walked away, watched me leave, then come back, all the while never knowing why we were there, with whom they're now left with, or if I was ever coming back....and the person didn't even care to greet me upon my return then I wouldn't exactly say that person cared about me at all much less liked me or loved me....just saying.
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I suppose you could consider it going on a tangent but I think it's more escalating the topic to the point of being interesting. Anyone who has been around computers for a long time knows how file deletion works and all of us have seen video or movies about people piecing together shredded documents.

The connection to life and information is quite relevant to the topic of deletion. In fact I believe even Stephen Hawking concerned himself with the concept of information loss (deletion) with regards to blackholes and the problems with conservation of energy (energy in the form of entropy). The resolution he came to involved the outer edge of a blackhole maintaining a version of this information forever.

If you expand the scope of the definition of information to be a specific state of the universe at a point in time, including its complex members (ie us and our consciousness), and remove the temporal importance of "now" then we are all information about states of the universe at varying points in its existence.

The point at which even that basic information (the current unique state of the universe) becomes erased or irrelevant (ie heat death when there is a perfectly homogenous distribution of energy throughout the universe) is quite interesting and depressing. At that point any record of the past and the ability to discern one moment of time from the next is gone. With no variation in the universe even time itself becomes impossible to measure unless your an objective viewer of the universe (God?).

Using your argument that because he didn't avoid a confrontation when he had the ability to, Zimmerman is guilty someone could make a very strong counterpoint.

Because Trayvon was only a couple of blocks from home but still decided to circle back once or twice even after losing his pursuer, he is guilty.

Now, depending on your bias you may or may not agree with the logic used to derive the second statement. However I'd be very curious to hear your logical analysis of why one of these two statements is accurate while the other is not.

Notice I said logical and not personal, as a logical analysis could be made and argued in court to convict someone like Zimmerman where as a personal argument would serve no good outside of trying to get people to say "oh, you ARE right and I was wrong."

Well maybe if he was terrified enough by the build up he would be too caught up in the moment to use logic and reason to figure out that multiple people were floating in front of the bridge talking.

I seem to remember hearing wind blowing across the mic so if it was windy enough it might feel like being in a high place.

With regards to that first paragraph. No.

Prejudice - an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge

Although humans categorize and use shortcuts to make sense of the world, the use of prejudice in any real or meaningful way is always to the detriment of those involved.

Instead of condoning prejudice in any form, how about condoning the application of knowledge, compassion, and intelligence for any given situation/event based on the reality of the immediate situation instead of relying on things like prejudice and stereotype to take the easy way out?

In other words...as we've all been told do not judge a book by it's cover (or title page/table of contents to extend the analogy) but instead by the full contents within.

Turk keeps asking what he is supposed to tell his God-Son or any other person of color if they're being followed or attacked? It's very simple really, the same thing I've been taught since I was a kid and the same thing I do now and the same thing I'll tell everyone else to do...

Run and Call for help. Run screaming "fire" and do everything you can do to escape until they force you to stand your ground. If you're forced to stand your ground, do anything possible to save your life and the lives of innocent people around you until you CAN escape to safety.

If he was only a couple of blocks from home, if he really did circle back twice, if he knocked zimmerman to the ground and was not shot in the back.....then regardless of whether he was defending himself or not, he did not run when he had the chances to. He doesn't deserve to die for that mistake, it's a tragedy he did and no one should have to worry about getting shot EVEN if they get into a fist fight.

However you can not tell me he did everything in his power to reach safety before pursuing a fight to the ground or even after his opponent went to the ground. Of course neither did Zimmerman and that is why he went on trial for felony charges. If neither person did everything they could to avoid this situation then neither of them is devoid of at least some blame in the confrontation itself.

ps I'm not white.

Kill it with fire. And then drones.

I'm not arguing that Slavery wasn't a key factor in the growth of the US economy up to a point. It was a major component of our history and evolution even outside of economic terms.

However since we were not one of the wealthiest countries in the world once slavery ended or anytime soon there after, I don't know that you can attribute the success after WW2 to slavery directly. Our having so much of the worlds wealth after WW2 had as much to do with how much everyone else LOST as it did with how much we HAD (and how much we made off of their loss because we were not slowed economically by war).

Sure you can say we weren't poised to take advantage of a post-WW2 world without slavery but the same can be said about many things including: Territory purchases, agricultural and technological advancements, organized banking, FDIC insured banking, a centralized monetary system, removal of the gold standard, social and political shifts in the world...you get the idea.

In fact some could make the argument that indentured servitude could be given a lot of credit for our early growth as well, which had nothing to do with African Slavery. And also provides evidence that even in the absence of full fledged slavery, the early colonials would have found a way to exploit cheap labor to accomplish their goals and they would not need a native or african population to do so.

Kudos to the last officer for being a good cop AND a good person (both are important in law enforcement!). The other officers should have been slower to act and quicker to discuss the situation, shame on them.

I do disagree with one thing the filmmakers did, which was withholding their name in some cases. I get not wanting to give up your ID or even full name, but you can at least give a first name. This isn't even about law and just cause. It's about being 2 human beings interacting and having a proper name to address each other with.

If I meet someone and theyre not willing to even give me a first name, I'll become suspicious even if I wasn't already!

Although I don't disagree that there is an edge of fear or paranoia in many Americans, this video hardly represents reality in my opinion. Slavery was not the cause of America's posterity and although fear was present I don't believe it was the primary motivation behind how the Native Americans and African Slaves were treated.

Unfortunately greed and racial ignorance would shoulder most of the blame for how colonists dealt with these groups.

It's also my opinion that fear is often used to veil things like greed and persecution in order to make them more acceptable to the general population.

I suppose if you specify "fear of losing their money/land/social norms/position of power" then yes, I suppose you can say that fear drove a lot of this. But fear of losing these things is more indicative of greed than it is fear of the groups in question.

I dont expect a slanted and simplified cartoon to capture the reality of history but this is pretty revisionist in the opposite direction from the text book history that American's are criticized for teaching ourselves.

Your fanaticism is in not being able to see that I'm not arguing against you, nor really against your true hurdles (the guy in the video above who will never see the merit in slugs or snails regardless of your evidence). I'm arguing against the need to see the other side as a combatant and instead as a group that has a different expertise and perspective. The 2nd voice in a complex evaluation at a national or global level.

Science minded people can easily project the benefits of research and have a lot of faith in science's ability to provide exponential benefits in the future. It's because this IS the case that this is even a debate. What WE seem incapable of doing is accepting that even exponential benefits and aggregate benefits can fall prey to scope and mass.

People on the other side don't see the long term or the exponential benefits however because theyre not science minded. Their focus has likely been somewhere else like business, healthcare, politics, social issues, etc. and so they will know more about THOSE lasting impacts than science minded people (including you and I). Unless youre suggesting science minded people are more experts on these topics as well?

So when using the explicit or implicit "greater good" as a measure it can be surprising how things unfold. I say "greater good" like that because the idea that the future benefit of current research is worth current spending over immediate problems implies "the greater good of society over time" and if you disagree with that then we can discuss that some other day.

Let me assist you quickly in countering my own comments so you can see why I feel we're not on the same page. The counter to the arguments i've expressed would be that "greater good" evaluation from moment to moment is NOT the correct way to fund research. Because the value that the general population will put on immediate issues (or support through public policy/voting/opinion) will always carry more weight than solving problems in the future (the immediacy bias of humans) it can not be used as a forward thinking way of funding research.

In other words, we don't need to convince people of greater good or of researches value over other uses of resources. The reason is that the only way to properly do science research is as a ongoing project on a mass scale with inter-dependencies that are too complex for anyone but the most informed to evaluate.

Arguing dollars and cents through cost benefit analysis or some other method would ultimately work against research funding, particularly when arguing with business and fiscal spending experts that can play on immediate human need/emotion.

As an aside, i enjoy this discussion but I truly think that there is a miscommunication about what topics you and I are concerned about and what our exact stances on them are. Perhaps this is my fault for not making my stance or opinion more clear because I was not trying to chime in on the debate at large, but chime in on the way people were undertaking the debate.

I believe research funding is even more important than immediate needs and that the justification for them does not have to meet any "greater good" measures because, having studied economics in college, I'm aware of how bad our evaluation of non-concrete goods/services are (ie the evaluation of human life or environmental impacts expressed in real world terms like money).

Because I believe this, I have to accept that it is an IMPORTANT balance to have people as biased in the opposite direction around to offset my opinion and I welcome open discussion (ie without assuming they don't know what theyre talking about from the beginning) with those people because it helps me to feel that our society IS actually meeting the needs of both types of people as best it can.

What I don't do is raise my nose at them as being uninformed and incapable of understanding the issues at large because I believe they do, but with a different process all together which still has value. I also don't assume that my fact and science based arguments will always win out over arguments with immediacy and immediate human benefit (which are very difficult to put a value on).

I apologize for harping on greater good, but it was being thrown around and wielded (even if implicitly) as though it was a single edged sword when it is in fact a double edged sword when the issue is viewed with the proper scope. I also didn't feel the need to be yet another voice clamoring for science funding when the opposite side had little to no presence. Group think is dangerous and without voices to temper the enthusiasm it's easy to forget that debates have 2 sides and both typically have merit even if the other side wouldn't care to admit it.

I don't feel compelled to provide concrete data because I never took a concrete stance for or against scientific spending. Even when referencing military research it was because some people commented about cutting military spending as though that would have no effect on research funding.

My posts were to point out that the question of research with merit is a very difficult one to answer especially if "the greater good" is used as a criteria because "greater good" encompasses things outside of science and which may be much more immediate than the results of research (ie healthcare, employment, international affairs, etc.)

Those things being high impact and immediate could have a negative impact when using "greater good" in a simplified way because each person's cost-benefit analysis of research will vary depending on their circumstances. I can only assume that the greater good is some kind of aggregate so you cant ignore the individual.

In fact, in order to use the greater good as a measuring stick to even START this debate in a "concrete" way as you say, the following would have to be answered and I don't think you could get a room of people to agree on the answers to them much less a nation or planet.


Who is affected by the greater good?
What do we mean by greater good (greater outcome, greater meaning, greater support)?
How is it measured?
Over what period of time?
In what way and to what are we comparing it?
What terms is the final measure of the cost-benefit analysis? Dollars? Happiness? Health? Opinion?

You said your reaction is not fanatic, yet you're attacking me as a foe despite the fact I never actually rallied against ur stance.

This entire time I'm essentially saying "people need to be more aware of the larger picture when trying to answer this question because both sides seem to focus on the smaller parts that support them (and therefore come across semi-fanatic). Furthermore if a proper analysis is used then ud likely find some research doesnt cut the mustard and some is not as insignificant as it might have first seemed."

To which you've promptly replied each time explaining about how mistaken I am in my understanding of the importance of scientific research. I left a piece of your last post so you can see how aggressively you address me directly despite me never having said I disagree with, but only with the vigor of which people will argue scientific research even when the other side has a valid point...or in this case were not making the point ur arguing against to begin with.

Not defending religion here, but a lot of high horsing going on.

So, did you guys know that a recent discovery has called into question one of the 2 main assumptions underlying the big bang? The cosmological principle to be exact, which means that we have to revisit that assumption and the big bang theory again to account for this.

Now, if after hearing this ur "belief" in the current existing big bang model was not refuted or shaken, IE if u still believe 100% that the big bang created the universe...then technically ur a baby step closer to being like everyone who believes in a religion.

"Well thats a bit of a leap!" you might say, however if when faced with scientific evidence contradicting an assumption needed for the big bang theory u don't adjust or modify ur belief system, ur no different than ANYONE who believes a partial truth or outright falsehood in the face of contradicting evidence.

So the next time ur explaining how much better science is at explaining the world with a religious zealot, before looking down your nose at them remember that sciences current golden child theory for the creation of the universe is being challenged and so maybe YOU shouldn't be so certain about your beliefs.

FYI I'm still fairly certain that a big bang type event created the observable universe.

I was attempting to say that people should not be fanatic on either side of this argument, as not all scientific research is the most efficient topic or use of resources and not all research deemed "insignificant" is actually insignificant.

The fact that people reacted so strongly to ANY criticism of current research or justifications for it shows just how fanatic some people are about the need to defend any and all research.

It's the nature of a scientist or science minded people to find value and merit in almost any scientific pursuit. But in a world of limited resources and with many other problems, we have to accept that there is an opportunity cost to any and all research, no matter how important.

For some the valuation of this opportunity cost will differ.

Explain to someone who has no insurance or has a problem with medical bills or has no job or has family members fighting abroad or is getting foreclosed on....that we need to spend money to better understand hermaphroditic snails and the intricacies of their mating rituals in order to better understand evolution and reproduction to maybe one day apply that technology to genetic research or fertility programs.

Then watch them give you the look of "thats great but why do I care about that now?" and understand that they are part of the greater good too.