That was a great clip, Blankfist. Not bad

Congrats on getting hitched my friend I hope it works out as well for you as mine has for me. You're both good people.

Hey, congrats to both of you Two of my favorite people on the sift, I hope you do great.

Thanks, added and upvoted.

In reply to this comment by mauz15:
Another one for your drug playlist
http://www.videosift.com/video/Unreported-World-Guinea-Bissau-Cocaine-Country

That's what I was just coming to post, the account has been reinstated. And this is a good lesson for those who cry that complaints don't do any good. The hell they don't. This is the second or third one I've seen reinstated within days when the suspension was supposed to be weeks and there were probably others before I started paying attention.

It's a business, with profit motives and posted rules. When they don't play by their own posted rules we're *supposed* to raise hell and expect them to justify things according to their own rules. Customer feedback does work.

Edit for more info. In the Thunderfoot case the above applied, in this case not so much it seems. YouTube was within their rights but better communication on what's going on seems needed to separate cases like this from ones like the Thunderfoot issue. Video from Randi just released on the subject.

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

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
I think its much more likely this is simply a bunch of religious wackos flagging videos and bitching to YT, and of course YT doesnt have time to go through all the videos and shit like that, so they just close the account, its probably even an automated process. ie: "if account X has Y number of flags, close account."


I think that's exactly what it is and I've had a mirror of the video up as well, one of the first. They suspended Thunderfoot a while back and they've hit others as well for what seems to be the same reason. Just get enough wack jobs to decide they want someone shut up and YouTube goes and does that for them.

I've got no problem with calling that censorship. Yeah it's private property and we have no "right" to free speech, but if they want to keep their reputation and our business they might want to consider it a bit anyway. At least justify the suspensions according to their own posted rules, knock off this unexplained crap. Even the people being suspended sometimes aren't sure why.

I thought it was funny but wasn't going to vote. Then I heard one of the write-in names was Xenu. I voted Colbert too just to make sure the Scientologists couldn't do that.

5 votes including mine in nearly 3 weeks? Time to *kill this one then, maybe someone else will have better luck with it one day.

Seems the problem has been solved. I don't use the service but that struck me as a poor business model and I didn't see anything in a quick web search so I got curious and dropped twitter a note to ask. Got a note back from Biz Stone, Co-founder, who says that it is against their policy and the offending account has been removed. They are doing their best to keep up with growth and it just didn't get taken care of fast enough to miss the news.

Eric, where he got the number I couldn't say but if you really wonder he might answer if he's got time, ask in the comments section on his page or drop him a private message and see. The group of them that I've been watching for a few weeks, some atheist and some Christian, seem to be pretty good about reasonable questions.

chilaxe, that's pretty certainly true but we've got a small catch I think and he touched on it in his post. Belief in evolution doesn't require atheism but it does help to enable it.

From what I've seen and read there's some indication of a biological inclination toward faith. You see it in more than religion. Scientology, nationalism, the neocons, there's been faith in a lot of aspects of things over recent years if we think about it. You probably don't need to attack it so much as to let them know some of what they've been told isn't true. Plant that seed of doubt and the ones who are open to it will figure it out themselves over time.

For those who are committed we won't break that faith anyway, no more than they've been able to teach people not to be gay, if it's a biological inclination toward faith it'll express itself one way or another. I think we tend to lose chances to reach that middle by pushing too hard at the extremes.

Easiest way to clarify that would be for you to just read an example. My debate is normally the drug war and I've done that for a LONG time now but activism is activism for the most part and the same methods work here too. The relevant players in this thread were myself in the first post linked (Yana Usdi on that board), Coldslaw, and Sideway.

I had planned (and there am now on) a break but that thread started just as I was leaving so I jumped back in for a short time to stop it from going hostile, bring it back on track. They were young earth creation "science" all the way and we had a real productive conversation. Nornerator is a real nice guy, an atheist, and I don't think he understood where I was going at first either but after a page or two he caught on and you can see it in his thanks for the later posts. The rest of the thread could be skimmed or skipped, they're not relevant to the point and it's enough reading already.

http://www.marijuana.com/religion/112515-will-atheism-ever-dominate-6.html#post1037462

In the end it comes down to a simple question to me . Do we want to make a difference or a gesture? I think we've got a better chance of making a difference if this approach is tried where there's an open mind to accept it and we'll never know if it's open if we assume from the start that it isn't.

If you want to understand them to any extent you have to understand a few things that don't tend to hit the news a lot. I'll try to touch on a couple quick.

http://www.prisonsucks.com/

Those racial statistics are as real as it gets. Part of the reason for them I explained a bit in another post here a fair time back. Additional reasons I didn't get into there include the 100:1 disparity between the way we sentenced powder and rock cocaine, and yes that's 100:1. 5 grams of rock bought the same 5 years as 500 grams of powder, we put stupid kids in cells with real dealers then we wondered why they came out like they did.

That's almost one young black man in eight between 25-29 years of age behind bars right now, today, with mandatory minimums and overlapping drug free zones rather than worse crimes playing too large a role in it. And we wonder at the single parent homes, low incomes and other issues and wonder why they can't get their acts together. We might want to take a real close look at the system we've built here. The problem isn't all on one side or the other but the faults of the system damned sure don't help them to solve theirs.

After they get through with all of that stuff we've got to consider the civil penalties drug convictions carry such as loss of eligibility for education loans and other types of aid as well as housing and other stuff. That's been better and worse at times and in places but it's played a role as well. And too much of it isn't due to worse crimes so much as it is wrong places.

I've got to get some sleep so if anyone expects an answer to anything you'll have to wait a few hours at least. I'll get to it though.

This is more or less the point I was trying to get to in another thread. I'm an atheist myself but that's irrelevant to most of the young earth type of debates. At least I always thought it was. Theism/atheism is a matter of belief, either you do believe or you don't. Science isn't about belief, it's about evidence and acceptance of that evidence. Separate issues and we don't help ourselves by confusing them with the very people who need the education the most.

Two individuals who I've run across and found to be interesting are YouTube Christians with a small difference from the ones we normally think of. One of them has a degree in Evolutionary Biology and produces his own videos on the subject, and both are active on the side of science in the debate. Not on the side of us atheists, but of science. It's a distinction worth remembering if we want to see more like them.

The home page for the author of this vid first, then the other guy I found interesting. The second one has a great playlist collection.

http://www.youtube.com/user/DonExodus2
http://www.youtube.com/user/djarm67

Good choice. I love this song, would upvote it again if I could.

http://www.prostatecentre.ca/prostate_function.html

Details linked in sidebar, that's the "function" part. Just a quick overview but if I linked a book on it I'm afraid nobody would read it, that offers more than the video did at least.

I'm not sure how moving it to the oversight of Congress would change anything. We all know how the repubs handled business and she named three of them as sponsors for the bill that helped to enable that mess but what she didn't note that I noticed was that we had a Dem President and I'm pretty sure they still had control of the Senate at that point too, repubs had the House and Dems the other two.

It couldn't have passed without BOTH parties involved, same as too many other things over the last few years. Same as with the bailouts that didn't contain oversight or control, same with the tax breaks for the rich even as their incomes were already at record levels, same with a lot of things.

We're asking one band of incompetents or thieves to take over for the next and expecting that something will really change for it. The blame in the end falls on us, the voters. We just don't care enough to get past the "who do I LIKE" simplistic shit and think for a change, that would mean missing a few reality TV shows and that's a price we aren't willing to pay. We got the government that we deserved in the end because we simply didn't care enough to demand better or to learn about the issues.