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I wanna know how the turkey got into the truck in the first place, I hear it's lonely out on the road.

Sorry...some details that were hastily reported have turned out to be more nuanced than originally thought, for instance it's now being reported that there were adult chaperones there, but the kids absolutely surrounded, taunted, and acted threatening to the native American elder, mocking his ceremony with racist chants and tomahawk chops to derisive laughter, they were not trying to join him as some have tried to claim.
They also blocked the progress of the planned, permitted closing ceremony, intentionally or not.

More video has surfaced of what appears to be some of these kids shouting at and harassing other people (the video I saw was 6+ MAGA boys screaming at a pair of girls) on this trip, away from this incident.
These aren't angels caught up and unfairly painted, these are kids who have reportedly posted videos of at least 4 of themselves dressed in black face and the whole school's bleachers chanting "caramel" at lone black basketball players at their school functions apparently with the full support of their teachers and school....that video just removed from the school website, but after going public.
They've already been invited to the Whitehouse.

We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes;
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.

Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.

I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
If I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth, and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

If the singular is this and the plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be named kese?

Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose;

We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!

So our English, I think, you all will agree,
Is the craziest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat;
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

And here is not a match for there,
Or dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose,
Just look them up, and goose and choose.

And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five,
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!

Ooooohhhh Kaaaaaaay then.

Sad, lonely man.

Seeing those few lone houses sitting amidst rubble and foundations, I have to wonder, what the hell were those houses made of?

Bob. You're just being stubborn.
They didn't refute anything..
Guess all logic escapes your brain. "I don't know" is different from "it didn't happen", they all said "I don't know, I don't recall, I don't think he would do that", not "I know it didn't happen"....guess that's too nuanced for today's republicans' education levels. Sad.

Democrats (all senators) are barred from discussing the FBI report in detail at all, so it's against Senate rules for them to refute any details. They did contradict the idea that it's a report of an investigation of the charges since the fbi refused to interview the accused, the accuser, anyone the accuser named as having knowledge, or inspect her medical records, or any other evidence she has offered them.

No, democrats aren't saying you have to believe her, they're saying you have to actually investigate her charges, democrats and independents are saying his demeanor is unsuited for the supreme court based on his Senate testimony, which was all a display of Republicans spinning on their uncontrolled emotions. Watching it confirmed that "feeling".

Jebus Christ, you can't even keep your own made up numbers right, yesterday it was 17, today it's 10, by next week it will be 15 agreed with her at this rate. Facts are Ford said one thing, others say they didn't see that, only Kavanaugh says it didn't happen.

You heard RGB is upset with democrats enough to quit? Lol...from where, Alex Jones or Trump?

I hope Dumbocrats pull the same move retardicans did and refuse to hold hearings if there's another opening, but they have no spine so likely won't.

Yeah, that lone number looks good by itself, you must be so proud of winning so bigly, and pleased your president has strengthened our union so well instead of dividing us further. Unemployment rates are down, but so is average worker income. More people are working more today, but for less money. I would prefer much higher unemployment with wages high enough that single worker households and stay at home parents become a thing....we're going the other direction to the point where multiple wage earners require multiple jobs just to keep a modest family solvent. If full employment still leaves one in poverty, having more people employed hardly helps escape poverty.

Congratulations on getting a hugely divisive temperamental judge forced through by the skin of your teeth. No whining if democrats do the same things in 2.5 years.

Holy shit! Lone Wolf and Cub! I have 3 omnibuses of that manga. Great stuff. I didn't know there were films.

Old cartoons like this are to new cartoons....What Lone Wolf Mcquad was to "The Texas Ranger". The original went to war with the cartels, from great distances with his sniper rifle, to close up with his Mac-10's, to murderous hand to hand combat. "The Texas Ranger" and his side kick shot their guns out of their hands

There is a generally held belief that consciousness is a mystery of science or a miracle of faith; that consciousness was attained instantly (or granted by god), and that one has either attained self awareness or has not.

I don't believe any of that. I believe like all things in biology, consciousness evolved to maximise a benefit, and occurred gradually, without any magic or mystery. The closest exurb1a gets to that is when he says at 6:28:

"Maybe evolution accidentally made some higher mammals on Earth self-aware because it's better for problem solving or something"

We need to know what other people are thinking and this is the problem that consciousness solves. If a neighbouring tribe enters your territory then predicting whether they come to trade, mate, steal or attack is beneficial to survival.

Initially this may be done through simulation - imagining the future based on past experience. A flood approaching your cave is bad news. Being surrounded by lions is not good. Surrounding a lone bison is dinner. Being charged by a screaming tribe is an upcoming fight.

We could only simulate another person's actions, but we had no experience that allows us to simulate another person's thoughts. You may predict that giving your hungry neighbour a meal may suppress their urge to raid your supplies but you still can't simply open their head and see what they are thinking.

Then for the benefit of cooperation and coordination, we started to talk, and everything changed.

Communication not only allows us to speak our mind, but allows us to model the minds of others. We can gain an understanding of another person's motivations long before they act upon them. The need to simulate another person's thoughts becomes more nuanced and complex. Do they want to trade, or do they want to cheat?

Yet still we cannot look into the minds of others and verify our models of them. If we had access to an actual working brain we could gradually strengthen that model with reference to how an actual brain works, and we happen to have access to such a brain, our own!

If we monitored ourselves then we could validate a general model of thought against real urges, real experiences, real problem solving and real motivations. Once we apply our own selves to a model of thought we become much better at modelling the thoughts of others.

And what better way to render that model than with speech itself? To use all of our existing cognitive skills and simply simulate others sharing their thoughts with us.

At 3:15 exurb1a referenced a famous experiment that showed that we make decisions before we become aware of them. This lends evidence to suppose that our consciousness is not the driver of our thoughts, but a monitor - an interpretation of our subconscious that feeds our model of how people think.

Not everybody is the same. We all have different temperaments. Some of us are less predictable than others, and we tend to avoid such people. Some are more amenable to co-operation, others are stubborn. To understand the temperament of one we must compare them to another. If we are to compare the model of another's mind to our own, and we simulate their mind as speech, then we must also simulate our own mind as speech. Then not only are we conscious, we are self-aware.

Add in a feedback loop of social norms, etiquette, acceptable behaviour, expected behaviour, cooperation and co-dependence, game theory and sustainable societies and this conscious model eventually becomes a lot more nuanced than it first started - allowing for abstract concepts such as empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, resentment, contempt, kinship, friendship, nurture, pride, and love.

Consciousness is magical, but not magic.

I'll bet $100 that the first political murder we see this cycle will be a Trump nut killing someone they decide is a dangerous lefty....and another $100 the right will shrink from it by saying he's a lone wolf crazy person and not a real Republican following the talking points to their logical conclusions.....oh wait, that already happened in Charlottesville, where's my $200?

I guess they learned nothing from pizza gate, and why would they, it didn't hurt them a bit when one of their own attacked a pizza parlor full of kids with his rifle looking for Clinton to kill because they told him she was there selling child sex slaves.
Jubus Fucking Christ. They're actually trying to start a civil war spouting this bullshit to impressionable morons with guns and hatred, and they know it. If you're politically left of Reagan, buy some guns, you just might need them soon.
*promote exposing the thinly veiled call for civil war if Republicans lose control.

100% agree with the first part.

"the internet is killing people's ability to be social"
Not so sure about that. Pre-internet incels definitely existed, but I don't think they would have "worked it out" any more than they would today. If anything, I think the internet can bring marginalised people together, for good or ill.

As you say, the problem is one of magnification or more specifically reinforcement.... the "echo chamber" effect.

OTOH, connecting with a marginalised group can be a positive. If there's no-one around you who has the same interests/desires/problems, the world can feel quite lonely. As usual, context matters.

The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

In a way Scahill is like a less educated\refined version of Noam Chomsky. He does good investigative work, and dedicates enormous energy into exposing and spotlighting the bad things that America does. That has a place, but without a similarly harsh and critical light being cast on America's targets/enemies it becomes propaganda.

Jeremy says he wouldn't work with Charles Manson to oppose trump, fair enough. What about kind of working with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Say, at least agreeing not to attack Stalin while you both deal with Hitler?

The world is incredibly complicated and the singular and lone focus on American mistakes paints a deceptive picture. Pointing out the problems with America's war in Iraq, like torture and Quantanamo and declaring these as so immoral we needn't even look at Saddam's past is propaganda. Saddam waged two campaigns of genocide against his own people. When America saw the abuses at Abu Ghraib, they shut it down and attempted to punish those responsible. When Saddam's brother used chemical weapons to exterminate Kurdish civilians Saddam commended him for it. Guantanamo is bad, but it doesn't mean we should fail to acknowledge the concentration camps that Saddam operated during his genocide of the Kurds. It doesn't mean it's unfair to observe that conditions in Saddam's prisons across the country were far more cruel during his entire reign.

There's a nuanced place here that Scahill and Chomsky and pundits like them just fail to acknowledge and encourages inaction at times were the lesser evil may well be for America to do something, even if aborting Gadafi's genocide doesn't make Libya a paradise after.

Awesome! I don't feel so lonely anymore.