Nice reply. Thanks Gwiz.

At the moment I am doing honours in ethics looking at gender reassignment surgery. The science behind it all is extremely subjective and there seems to be a lot of cherry picking of factors and studies where a certain result is desired. There are a few scientific findings that have consensus and they mainly involve how little difference there is between men and women. Lots of the differences we see are at the extreme end of the scale, aka sports analogies. In every capacities men and women are capable of doing pretty much the same thing. Some extreme cases will involve things that only men can do due to the outright strength involved but other things we may think to be too physical women have done and are doing in other 3rd world nations all the time. Women can be conditioned to be very strong and very tough. We just don't value that or pursue that in the West.

The Elevatorgate and other examples should simply be ignored. They are immediately identifiable as being ridiculous and threaten to undermine to the entire project of a meritocracy that seems to be at the core of the liberal tradition (liberal in the post enlightenment sense, not the Fox news "All liberals are evil" sense).

You are right that society is probably not consciously trying to keep women down. THis is one of the major criticisms that feminism brings forth. It is that we do it tacitly and automatically. When we see an all women rock band we say "That's an all womens rock band" but when we see an all male rock band they are simply "A rock band". Simple and largely harmless example but it extends to every facet of society. Look at CEO's. When a women makes CEO of a huge multinational it is noteworthy. There are certain assumptions made that she's a ball breaker or a tough business woman. All things we associate with masculinity. Its as if there is no role for femininity in powerful roles either from women or men.

Ramble ramble too. Running out of stuff to add without writing a HUGE thesis.

What is the physical pain of a belt slap compared to the social pain of ridicule for throwing a ball like a girl?

But seriously, It's curious how physical punishment is immediately taken for abuse these days. We don't know if he was hitting hard or often enough to injure the kid physically/psychologically.

I'm not a father, I was raised with physical punishment, but I personally don't agree with it, totally unnecessary. *Maybe* in extreme cases when you have to let the child feel the pain for screwing up, but ideally you don't want to let the situation get to that point. I also don't agree with him hitting the kid for throwing a ball poorly.

That being said, as long as there's no serious physical abuse, who are we to judge how he should raise his kid? Human beings are violent by nature, our society is violent, and boys, specially, have to learn how to deal with violence growing up. Is it right to expect raising a child not to involve violence EVER? Specially today with these kids running their mouths off to their parents, throwing tantrums like little dipshits and... throwing balls like little girls!

It doesn't matter if this type of thing happens in other countries.. it give's no one the right to do horror simulations to someone else (regardless of their age) without them knowing what's going on.. in this case with or without parents consent just to teach them what the conductor thinks is a good lesson.
Where is the research to show this does good for a person? I've never seen it and it's one of the type of studies/subject i pay attention to.

Physical abuse can cause broken bones, damaged to tissue and ligaments etc, these things are more effectively treated by surgeons if ill-advised to be left to heal over time (not necessarily including extreme cases, also not condoning).
Whereas psychological abuse can lead to psychotic breakdowns that potentially destroy a persons personality and grasp on reality causing mental destabilization that can last a lifetime and currently be irreparable.

@ SpaceGirlSpiff, great sift btw.

@ Shinyblurry
Disclaimer: your quotes of my post say 'A10anis said'. Wouldn't be good for A10anis to get flak for any of my comments/opinions.
I didn't properly frame-quote you again this time because i couldn't be bothered trying to separate your quotes from mine, but your response was much more respectable imo

Regardless of what your point meant to be, what your hypothetical story states is to act on another persons unverified word, that is not rated as trust worthy by past events. People aren't likely to do this on any other subject, because their reasoning will interject and a request for evidence will be made.
E.g. kill that women because she's a witch.
In this case you're likely (i hope) to either want proof beyond reasonable doubt prior to acting, or will disregard the request. For me, same goes for other extreme cases like the idea of God existing or any God being the correct one.

I didn't say pride had no affect. Your statement was that pride was the 'only' thing stopping A10anis, i disagreed and outlined a few other things stopping me personally. For the record, my bio states "Proud to be an atheist". There's pride alright, a fair bit of it, but it doesn't start, dominate nor end the subject for me.

Quote "Since there is no empirical evidence for or against Gods existence, how do you calculate how likely or unlikely His existence is?"
1. Firstly, although humans are still learning about many subjects and haven't yet fully explained everything, we've done a remarkably good job so far over the past 400 years, and are at a stage where we don't need Gods in order to explain things and are content with mysteries over magic while we figure things out.
2. Because there's no evidence, I leave it to those who make the incredible claim to prove it. 'Spaghetti monster' argument, onus is on the claimer for proof.
3. I also look at the size of the universe vs the size of the claimed favorite species and see it as an illogical waste of effort. It's like building the entire earth for a few ants that will exist for a few minutes.
4. But my favorite is the psychology of it. Leaving this out because I would write a novel and loose my weekend in the process.

Re the sun comment, I've read a few religious books as i was walking away from the whole concept, some cover to cover, others skimmed through them, didn't like the ideas of how horrible stories were passed off as 'good' because of a belief in God.
But now days I do take most statements like my sun one from net searches, and yes, you're right, the book doesn't say it directly. But it not far off seems to imply it a few times, at least enough for the head of the Catholic church to have gotten behind the idea for a decent period of time.

Original sources? No sorry (had a bit of a search but lost interest), I'll give you this link instead, review it if you care. Reason being, if my statement turned out to be wrong, I'd accept it quick smart as i don't actually care whether Jesus was like others before him or not, and if i was right, again wouldn't care but also i doubt it would have much impact (a general statement re believers). I made the comment because from what i have read previously it seemed plausible.
http://jdstone.org/cr/files/mithraschristianity.html

Investigated Christ? Bits and pieces, but not a complete investigation by any means. The guy either died a long time ago or never existed. So I'm at a bit of a disadvantage and lacking a devoted level of interest to go balls out on the research. I settle for the notion that we're able to come up with plausible concepts and explanations without involving a God.

Quote: "I would suggest it is the distorted lens through which you see God that informs your negative opinion of Him."
I agree, if by distorted you mean 'different' to your lens.

>> ^kceaton1:

I could destroy her whole concept by reducing the entire mathematical world to a structure scheme that can ONLY be ever displayed as a fractional environment, except for 0 or infinity, as they are special forces unto Math.

Vi actually covers this briefly when she talks about Hyperreals. Also, you wouldn't be destroying her whole concept by reducing the mathematical world to a fractional environment, as this already exists: What you describe is the set of Rational Numbers, where all numbers can be expressed as a fraction of two integers. .999... is still describable as the series 9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000... so the concept is still sound, and still sums to 1 (or 1/1). As an aside, 0 is a rational number and can be expressed as a fraction as well. Infinity is not a number.

Finally, in before "Now you're just nitpicking" or "You don't have to be a dick." At this level, nitpicking and checking for consistency is what Mathematics is all about, so please expect it.

>> ^kceaton1:

So I would ask her this question concerning .9999~ not equaling one. If we take two pinballs and start to count all the electrons--but, midway through we strip ONE electron from one pin; essentially making this our .9999~ pinball. By the time we get done counting the electrons which pinball will have less and which will have more? Well the problem is that IN FACT the pinball that had one taken off could actually NOW have more than the other pinball. So do either actually equal one?

There is a fundamental flaw in this reasoning, which is that the number of electrons in both pinballs is finite. You will eventually stop counting, and when you divide (electrons in Pinball A) by (electrons in Pinball B) you end up with a rational number which is not 1, but also not equal to .999..., so the test is inconclusive. Assuming both pinballs had an infinite number of electrons in them also does not help, as then the answer to "what is ePA/ePB" is "I will never stop counting" (implying correctly that Infinity - 1 = Infinity).

>> ^kceaton1:
This is why Mathematics are very specific, but in use--in the field--they will have LARGE caveats where the majority of the mental masturbation falls completely apart. Because, many of these discussions DO OCCUR at the EXTREMES of Math (if you know what I mean) and fundamentally the only places that use these parts are in extreme measurements; measurements where chance can become a powerful player.

I actually disagree with you here, though I think in practice we both have the same respect for Mathematics, so you can take or leave that disagreement as you please. In my mind Mathematics is "absolute" because it has been proven to be consistent, so the mental exercises are valid even in extreme cases. In those extreme cases sometimes things need to be added to what is already known to correctly describe what is going on or how something works, but the math that has come before is still sound. In fact, the soundness of Mathematics is the whole reason we can add onto it -- Because we know that it will not break. If it does, then we have done something wrong.

artician, it's software that stabilized it. After Effects by Adobe, for example, will analyze the pixels and apply some 3d voodoo magic in order to remove jitter. It creates, in extreme cases such as this, a warping effect that is disconcerting. If this was attempting to be viral, I doubt they would go for the "double negative" or "reverse psychology" angle...

What-if-extreme-case-yadda-yadda. The point of the video is to demonstrate that you have the right not to talk to cops, and that the cops can only detain you if they have probable cause (or consider you a material witness?? can't remember). That's all. He probably doesn't drive around doing this all the time.

Or maybe be does do it all the time to protect himself against the police, which I totally understand as I've been abused by them many times, and knowing my rights in the face of abusive officers has saved me a lot of grief in the past, and more knowledge could have saved me even more.

Either way, I get it. Stop equating people exercising their rights with drunk drivers. And either way, DUI programs aren't really designed to catch drunk drivers. The primary function is to scare people into not driving drunk in the first place. So not cooperating with one has no effect on numbers of drunk drivers.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I heard the max you can lock someone up over there is like 20 years or something? Any truth to that, and any chance this guy will be the exception to such a condition?


The maximum penalty in Norway is 21 years. Earlier this year, long before this terrible event, there was talk of increasing the limit to thirty something. But in extreme cases the law opens up for keeping people in custody for longer, even for life, if they are deemed a danger to society.

I am strongly against making any exceptions even for an isolated case like this, and I believe most of Norway is against it too. To let a terrorist subvert the justice system would be a terrible mistake, since it puts the whole system into question. If one makes exceptions for one guy, who's to say there will not be exceptions for others as well in the future? And in any case, revenge is a terrible foundation for a judicial system.

I believe the worst punishment he can get will be to live his actions when he grows older in prison and has time to think about his actions and see that they had no effect on our society.

Enjoying yourself is fine, maybe even getting out of control a little is fine. Drunk driving is not fine. Making other people suffer unduly to your decisions/passions/whatever (whether that be any kind of abuse of drugs or drink, racing your car down the freeway, setting fire to your house in a rage, and whatever else you can come up with that are VERY extreme cases but still under your control) is not good. And then on top of that expecting to win in a court if people refuse to put up with your bullshit effecting their livelihoods and lives overall.....that's just blatantly clear to the non-insane people of the world.

If he wants to go out in a blaze of locking hookers in closets and bathrooms and snorting/shooting/swallowing anything he can find into his body..more power to him. Just be prepared for your estate to cover the expenses of the hotels you've trashed, and also don't try to fight it when you lose your job for not being able to perform your job duties.

This kind of behavior is either mental illness or he's been diagnosed with some terminal disease and he's said fuck it and plans to blow his money on the way out.

>> ^NinjaInHeat:

Rocknroll Charlie boy. The only thing that bothers me about this interview is how much disdain this conforming bitch has for hedonism, that and the fact that he agreed to entertain this retarded interview in the first place, he should know better. Some people like to enjoy life, some people can't grasp that notion. I like how black and white "normal" people think the mind of a drug user is. As if when one is using he is immediately completely physically addicted, he is sick and needs help, he does everything not out of choice but as a result of having a sick mind. Some people choose to take drugs, some people manage their addictions and even embrace them to certain extents. If you don't understand that that's fine, no one asks you to understand, just accept.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^jonny:
I'm pretty sure the cashier at the corner store is a lot more than her job.
That's actually the point Shawn was making, on grand scale. Everyone is more than they appear, and there's nothing inherently different between the people at the bottom of our class structure, and the top. It's more about costumes and the script we've written, than any sort of truly consequential difference.

Yeah, I got that. What I was saying is that he abandons the idea at sort of a crucial point. He's assuming that the cashier or cop or whatever is somehow unable to fully express their talents because the job they have doesn't require it. In the extreme case, look at Albert Einstein. While working an incredibly dull job in a patent office, he writes two of the most important scientific papers in history. I'm not saying this invalidates his entire thesis, just that he needs to look at a larger picture of life.

As a tangent, this also brings up the definition of poverty. The living conditions of many people we might consider the working poor today would be looked upon longingly by people only 100 years ago. Now, I'm not suggesting that means we can ignore the problem, just that we need to understand the context. Certainly there are many people today that are in conditions as bad or worse as the working poor of 100 years ago. My point with this tangent is that it's important to clearly define specific goals you want to achieve when talking about eradicating poverty. Some of those goals are obvious, like food and shelter adequate to maintain reasonable health. But then there are some goals, like access to information (via internet, libraries, whatever) that you may want to include and aren't obvious to some, or are understood but rejected due to a lack of understanding of why they're important.

To try to tie all this together, poverty isn't just about money, just like a person's life isn't defined just by their job, and a person's character isn't defined just by their upbringing.

@kronosposeidon is right, there isn't any room for additional tags and honestly, it would get really convoluted if any more tags are added on top of the existing ones. My suggestion would be to make an overlay a la FlashBlock that warns you more specifically about the nature of the content before you get to the video itself. However I'd reserve that for the more extreme cases, because I'd be annoying if every NSFW video had such an overlay.

Researchers are looking again at controlled dosages of psychedelics, this time to treat extreme cases of major depression...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html

[redacted]

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be an authority on the topic, I just thought I'd share my musings for any who may be interested

I'm extremely surprised that none of the physicist could give a remotely satisfactory answer to the beam-hand interaction question. I realise that the energies involved are extreme so weird things may happen and they obviously specialise in more fundamental aspects of the physics but I would have expected all of them to know at least a little bit about the physics of interactions between charged particle radiation beams with solid objects or water.

I only learnt a bit about proton beam therapy used in radiation oncology during my Masters in Medical Physics, and I'll admit I've forgotten a lot of it and can't remember all the calculations or parameters involved, but it seems to me like this would be a similar although perhaps more extreme case. Ultimately you would be receiving some dose of ionising radiation, the amount would depend on various things.

As solid as our hand appears to be it is still mostly empty space on an atomic scale, and there is a very high likelihood that protons in the beam will not collide with anything as they pass through. This is particularly true at very high energies, I forget exactly why... either due to momentum or the time spent in close enough proximity with atomic nuclei or something, but protons interact relatively weakly until they lose enough energy through the few interactions that do occur, at which point the likelihood of further interactions rises exponentially dumping all the remaining energy very rapidly. It is interesting to note here that at medically relevant energies 100-200Mev (17-35 thousand times lower than the LHC) this energy dump requires between 5 and 20cm tissue for the initial slow down to take place before the beams slow enough to dump the bulk of their energy. Your hand is at most a few centimetres thick and barely sufficient enough to do this at 100MeV let alone 3.5TeV. Graph which illustrates this.

Anyway, energy from the beam would be deposited due to some deflections and collisions and result in ionisation of some atoms either directly by collisions or indirectly by xray/gamma rays produced in the interactions. The few direct collisions between protons in the beam and atomic nuclei would also likely result in exotic particles and radiation further contributing to the dose you receive.

Other things to consider are whether the protons that shoot through your hand are still following sensible enough trajectories for the LHC to bend them around for another pass. At near light speeds they would be shooting around the LHC many thousands of times per second so even if the chances of interactions occuring in your hand are slim, each proton that manages to make another pass rather than shoot off on a random path that takes it out of the LHC, will have many opportunities to interact and deposit energy.

So depending on just how many protons are in the beam, and how much energy they dump into your hand, the effect could be anywhere from increased chance of cancer to a radiation burn of some sort if not a hole in your hand (although I suspect that most extreme scenario is unlikely).

All of this assumes my understanding isn't completely void at the energies involved which, if it is, may explain why the physicists didn't mention any of this.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Totally agree that "preemptive self-defense" is some hardcore Orwellian bullshit. Amazing how much of the religious Right get behind the idea. Jesus said turn the other cheek, not "stab that guy in the belly because he looks like he might hurt me".
>> ^SDGundamX:

Well, I thought he was suggesting in the video that initiating violence is wrong but defending yourself is okay. Very few pacifists are absolute pacifists in that they believe no violence should ever be done--not even in self-defense.
The response that most people have to the idea of pacifism (as seen in the posts for this vid) is that sometimes violence is justified. Maybe sometimes, like in immediate self-defense, it is. The problem I have with that standpoint though is that in practice often people are far to quick to resort to violence and to use extremely flaky logic to justify their actions. Take the invasion of Iraq: that was couched as a defensive action. In order to protect the U.S. from a terrorist attack, the U.S. would make a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.
I suppose that personally I feel that violence is only justified in extreme cases. And, when violence is justified, it should never be glorified because invariably, resorting to violence is going to sow the seeds of future violence. World War II is generally seen as a "justified war" from the viewpoint of Americans, for instance, but that war inadvertently planted the seeds of the Cold War, the Middle East conflict, and Vietnam conflict even as it was stamping out the flames of Fascism in Europe.
What is really important is stopping that cycle of violence--eradicating the roots of violence so that people don't ever feel the need to use violence to get what they want. To that end, I can get behind the idea expressed in the beginning of this vid that we should strive to create a world in which we don't initiate violence but still be free to defend ourselves if attacked. That's a start at the very least.
>> ^dannym3141:
You're right. My pacifist sister talks about great tragedies performed by people and said "they should have stopped him before all the killing and war began!" - but if you ask her how to stop a person who doesn't want to listen to kind words, she has no answer. A fully pacifist world might be ok, but if one single person decided not to be, you're boned.