Bye Chet.

Oh crap, Wapner too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/arts/television/joseph-a-wapner-judge-on-the-peoples-court-dies-at-97.html?_r=0

I always thought this 'problem' was bullshit - not because I dreamed of being some special snowflake 'outside the box' little shit who just wants to bypass the difficulty in question, but because the answer is so obvious. If you have perfect certainty that you can either save 1 life or 5 lives, then that's the same as choosing to kill 1 person or 5 persons. Perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action. It's only in reality, where there's uncertainty, that you can balk at taking action.

In the same way I find the moral dilemma of killing Hitler as a baby to be ridiculous. If you, as a time traveler from 2016, balk at the idea of going back to 1889 to kill baby Hitler, but you're fine with going back to 1939 to kill adult Hitler and maybe prevent WW2, then you essentially want hundreds of thousands of people to die in concentration camps just to make you feel good about your murderous action. Ridiculous.

Guns don't kill people, people do. Sure, but if you remove the guns it means a lot fewer people will die until the societal problems are addressed.
Then you can bring the guns back in.

i am just going to add to the opinions and perspectives that @MilkmanDan ,@ChaosEngine ,@dannym3141 and especially @newtboy who i agree with so clearly that i swear we are related.

since many dynamics have already been covered, i.e:police culture,racism,incompetence etc etc.

i shall offer a historical perspective in the ways of the power dynamic.

while this is a power vs powerlessness dynamic dealing with agents of the state,it helps to understand just how we got to this point,and it is NOT the first time we have been here.

see:labor movement of the 30's and the labor strikes,and the response from not only the business community but our own government.

see: the civil rights movement and segregation,and how demagouges used political power to divide by way of racism,and then used police to intimidate,beat and imprison.

there are many MANY examples here in america where the police have been used to suppress and oppress a people or community for less than altruistic reasons,and most certainly not aligning with the ideology we were taught in school the function of police.nevermind the syrupy sweet,idealized picture shoved down our throats since an early age.

so we see on our facebooks,our twitters and/or whatever social media you prefer,that black lives matter...and the counter point,that NO..ALL lives matter.

now this would make sense in a world that never took history into account,or a growing cultural norm of violence and oppression that had been slowly seeping into poor communities (mainly black and latino).

oh wait..
that's right.
social media pundits NEVER fucking consider any of those factors,because just like bill o'reilly,those are pesky nuances and context conflict with their own narrow narrative.

but let us consider them and how they may possibly be a major driving factor in americas current climate.

let us take ferguson as an example,that is a good place to start.
and let us go back to 2008,where we can see the boiling begin to take place in this extremely impoverished community which was already struggling.

the population is a black majority,poor to working poor.home ownership is low,food stamp recipients are high and the future is pretty bleak.

in 2008 ferguson received approximately 18% of it's total fiscal revenue from misdemeanor infractions i.e:traffic,parking,moving violations.small time stuff.basic fines for small infractions.in 2008 that number jumped to 66%.

why?
what happened?
what changed?

well the comptroller of ferguson (and greater st louis),along with HUNDREDS of other smaller municipalities across the country,had bought the rotten fish that wall street was selling in the form of bullshit derivatives.

now wall street and the big banks got their tax payer bailout,but towns like ferguson did not.they lost millions,sometimes billions.this meant pensions were either reduced or outright denied,because there was NO money!

but a town still has to pay police.
fire fighters and school teachers,
clerks and judges,
keep the roads paved and the street lights working.

so what is a local government to do?
can't tax the working class who own homes.you already jacked their property tax to the roof.
can't tax the local business,you already squeeze them as well.
how about those non-property owning people in ferguson?
they need to pay up as well,and let's use the police force to relinquish them of the paltry money they don't have.

to the tune of 66% of all of fergusons revenue.
that is insanity.

so what if you live in ferguson?
chances are you are black,and either poor or working poor.

you make,if you are lucky,20 grand a year and by one man's testimony he paid over 2,000 in traffic tickets in one year.the majority of americans dont see those kind of numbers their entire lifetime.

and what if you began to realize that it was not just you.that almost every person you know or talked to had similar stories.

would you begin to feel a tad bit targeted?

what if the city of ferguson started to become very creative with not only their rules but how they enforced those rules?

what if every year the fines went up?
not remained the same,but actually UP? every year.

what if,as a community people began to actually fear the police? to experience anxiety just by the sight of a patrol car,even though they were not engaging in anything illegal? and who knows...maybe there is some new ordinance on the books that you are unaware of?

would you become paranoid and suspicious of law enforcement?

and then..what if....you started losing friends to cops.people you grew up with being shot in the street,and every time the mayor comes out and calls it a "justifiable killing".

would that make you feel any better?
any less paranoid or anxious?

there was ONE police shooting in ten years and then..as if by magic ..(which is how the media seems to always portray this..shocking news..at 11)..you lose 5 friends in a year.all to cops..all "justifiable".

would you begin to think there was a conspiracy?
targeting you and your neighbors?

i BET you would.
i know i would.

now lets look at the cops.

they are just a tool.
an instrument for the state to uphold the law and write citations for infractions.they dont MAKE the laws,nor the infractions,not even the fines.

they just do what they are told.

and they are told to go into these poor and working poor neighborhoods and write tickets,a LOT of tickets.

do you really think they are unaware of the growing hostility towards them? the looks of disgust,fear and apprehension?

but...this is their job,and they do what they are told.

they see.
they know.
they are aware of the growing hatred towards them,and this makes them anxious..and defensive..and in some horrible,tragic cases...trigger happy.

a natural and normal response to heightened stimuli in the face of great uncertainty.

so they react impulsively and out of fear in a way that ten years ago would have been unheard of.

they think themselves good cops.
they do a good job.
they do what they are told.
and the people hate them for it.
so they respond instinctively and with poor judgement.

we..as citizens,respond with disgust and indignation when a cop abuses his/her authority.we see this as a major moral breach in the citizen/cop relationship,because we feel as agents of the law they should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us...and rightly so,but when you put a human being in a tense and dangerous situation,not of their making,they will fail at some point to react correctly and with sound judgement.

they SHOULD be held accountable,but so should the city council members and the mayor and all the local representatives who created this toxic climate in the first place.

the lesson to be learned here is that nothing is a binary situation when people are concerned.

so when black lives matter protestors address people to make them aware of the situation,this is what they are talking about.the police killing are only a last stage manifestation of a situation that began in 2008 on wall street.

and we need to be aware,because right now it is the predominantly black communities,but soon coming to a neighborhood near YOU.

the poor and working poor have become expendable.no longer relevant to the system.which is why police shootings are being handled the way they are.our value is ever increasingly being judged on how well we can feed the system.

until this disparity is addressed there will continue to be police shootings.people will die and there will be no indictments.

because police do what they are told.

it is up to us to make policy makers accountable for their actions,and in doing so address a toxic climate that both the poor,working poor and cops alike have to swim in.

stop forcing cops to write tickets to fund a city that lost it's savings due to fuckhead bankers.

this blood..all of it..is on those bankers hands.

Yeah, I know people have died there, but I think those kids are regulars. The last kid jumped in just for the heck of it... The father, presumably filming them, didn't seem too worried to me. I think those boys have done that before. Crazy in my book, but maybe not in theirs.

Lawrence Wilkerson's dismissive comments about self defense are very disrespectful to people who have had to resort to self defense. He wouldn't say things like that had he been unfortunate enough to have had such a personal experience. (As one parent of a Fla victim said - his child would have given anything for a firearm at the time of the event.)

Re. 2nd amendment, yes, it's not for pure self defense. The reasoning is provided within the text. The government is denied legal powers over gun ownership ('shall not be infringed') in order to preserve the ability of the people to form a civilian paramilitary intended to face [presumably invading] foreign militaries in combat ('militia').

It's important to remember that the U.S. is a republic - so the citizens are literally the state (not in abstract, but actually so). As such, there is very little distinction between self defense and state defense - given that self and state are one.

Personally, I believe any preventative law is a moral non-starter. Conceptually they rely on doling out punishment via rights-denial to all people, because some subset might do harm. Punishment should be reserved for those that trespass on others - violating their domain (body/posessions/etc). Punishment should not be preemptive, simply to satiate the fears/imaginations of persons not affected by those punished. Simply, there should be no laws against private activities among consenting individuals. Folks don't have to like what other folks do, and they don't have to be liked either. It's enough to just leave one another alone in peace.

Re. Fla, the guilty party is dead. People should not abuse government to commit 3rd party trespass onto innocent disliked demographics (gun owners) just to lash out. Going after groups of people out of fear or dislike is unjustified.







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As an aside, the focus on "assault rifles" makes gun control advocates appear not sincere, and rather knee-jerk/emotional. Practically all gun killings utilize pistols.

There are only around 400 or so total rifle deaths per year (for all kinds of rifles combined) - which is almost as many as the people who die each year by falling out of bed (ever considered a bed to be deadly? With 300 million people, even low likelihood events must still happen reasonably often. It's important to keep in mind the likelihood, and not simply the totals.).

Around 10'000 people die each day out of all causes. Realistically, rifles of all sorts, especially assault rifles, are not consequential enough to merit special attention - given the vast ocean of far more deadly things to worry about.

If they were calling for a ban+confiscation of all pistols, with a search of every home and facility in the U.S., then I'd consider the advocates to be at least making sense regarding the objective of reducing gun related death.

Also, since sidearms have less utility in a military application, a pistol ban is less anti-2nd-amendment than an assault rifle ban.







As a technical point, ar15s are not actually assault rifles - they just look like one (m4/m16).
Assault rifles are named after the German Sturm Gewehr (storm rifle). It's a rifle that splits the difference between a sub-machinegun (automatic+pistol ammo) and a battle rifle (uses normal rifle/hunting ammo).

- SMG is easy to control in automatic, but has limited damage. (historical example : ppsh-41)

- Battle rifles do lots of damage, but are hard to control (lots of recoil, using full power hunting ammo). (historical example : AVT-40)

- An 'assault rifle' uses something called an 'intermediate cartridge'. It's a shrunken down, weaker version of hunting ammo. A non-high-power rifle round, that keeps recoil in check when shooting automatic. It's stronger than a pistol, but weaker than a normal rifle. But that weakness makes it controllable in automatic fire. (historical example : StG-44)

- The ar15 has no automatic fire. This defeats the purpose of using weak ammo (automatic controlability). So in effect, it's just a weak normal rifle. (The M4/M16 have automatic, so they can make use of the weak ammo to manage recoil - and they happen to look the same).

Practically speaking, a semi-auto hunting rifle is more lethal. A Remington 7400 with box mag is a world deadlier than an ar15. An M1A looks like a hunting rifle, and is likewise deadlier than an ar15. Neither are viewed as evil or dangerous.

You can also get hunting rifles that shoot intermediate cartridges (eg. Ruger Mini14). The lethality is identical to an ar15, but because it doesn't look black and scary, no one complains.

In practice, what makes the ar15 scary is its appearance. The pistol grip, the adjustable stock, the muzzle device, the black color, all are visual identifiers, and those visuals have become politically more important than what it actually does.

You can see the lack of firearms awareness in the proposed laws - proposed bans focus on those visual features. No pistol grips, no adjustable stocks, etc. Basically a listing of ancillary features that evoke scary appearance, and nothing to do with the core capabilities of a firearm.

What has made the ar15 the most popular rifle in the country, is that it has very good ergonomics, and is very friendly to new shooters. The low recoil doesn't scare new shooters away, and the great customizability makes it like a gun version of a tuner-car.

I think its massive success, popularity, and widespread adoption, have made it the most likely candidate to be used in a shooting. It's cursed to be on-hand whenever events like Fla happen.

-scheherazade

Monkey Island games were always wacky and difficult puzzles simply because it required you to think of objects in such ways as to break the fourth wall of the game itself. Guybrush and his infinite pocket space.

Also note, these are good games despite their frustrating bits. There were far more frustrations prior to the days where you are given dialog choices, when you were required to type in all of the dialog options using key words. Cough, cough, older Tex Murphy games and just about every text adventure from the dawn of home computers.

I loved those games, but many of them turned into puzzles that maybe one person in the family finally figured out after brute force trying thousands of combinations of objects with each other. I did that multiple times in the original Myst. I think there was one passcode that took close to 10,000 attempts. LOL!

Or how about games that had dead ends but didn't alert the player? Cough, cough Maniac Mansion. People could die, but as long as one person was left alive, the game never ended, even though only the bad endings are left. But it's not like modern games, some of the bad endings were themselves puzzles, and some deaths lead to a half good and half bad ending, like winning a lottery and then having a character abandon the plot altogether because he/she is rich and then THE END.

Those were the days. None of this FNAF shit -- which is really what deserves the infamy of terrible, convoluted puzzles...

Before video games became as massively popular as they are today, it wasn't always a requirement to make your game easily solved and you were not always provided with prompts for failure or success until many grueling hours, days, months, sometimes YEARS of random attempts. How many families bought a Rubik's Cube versus how many people solved it without cheating and learning the algorithms from another source?

Go back hundreds or thousands of years and it wasn't common for chess or go or xiangqi (the most popular game in the entire world TODAY) to come with rules at all, so only regions where national ruling boards were created will there be standardized rules; so, the truth, rules, patterns, and solves of games have traditionally been obfuscated and considered lifelong intellectual pursuits; and, it's only a recent, corporatized reimagining of games that has the requirement of providing your functional requirements and/or game rulings so as to maintain the value of its intellectual property. I mean, look at how Risk has evolved since the 1960s -- now there's a card that you can draw called a "Cease Fire" card which ends the game, making games much shorter and not epic at all. Easy to market, but old school players want the long stand offs -- I mean, if you're going to play Risk... TO THE BITTER END!

Oh, so now pathetic PC is coming into play too? Ever thought about that I too am a human, who cant just swallow all that shit without venting, especially when confronted with ignorance that caused all this shit in the first place? I mean WTF... people are dying, and you expect me to pretend like them that all is well? I am starting another war with words like those? If that is the case, we are beyond hope anyway, and I am glad I make people like those uncomfortable.

Oh my gawd, I vented my frustration a bit at the end. Damn me into oblivion for being... a war mongering, conflict seeking troll hypocrite... or something...
... in less than 1% of what I wrote!

OK, you're clearly not reading anything I write.

My point is NOT that "they shouldn't be in a church you don't approve of".

My issue is with your assertion that some people NEED the church. It's not cherry picking, it's the central point.

And I never used the word "shouldn't".

Once again, I have no problem calling out someone for belonging to an awful organisation, anymore than I would for a clan member or boko haram.

And clearly, at least 1500 people decided they don't "need" the church any more.

Just because people like a thing, doesn't mean they "need" it and it doesn't mean it isn't bad for them.

As for it being none of my business, well, you posted the video, I'm entitled to comment. And when the religions stop forcing their bullshit on everyone else and actively harming others, then it'll stop being my business.

In the meantime, you're goddamn right I will shake my fist at "millions of people" and tell them they're wrong. So what? Millions of people believe in creationism. Millions of people still think women are second class citizens. Millions of people are dying because some fucking morons told them not to use a condom.

Millions of people are wrong.

@Barbar

your comment is a non sequitur.
the video was not addressing those points but solely revealing the:employee/employer dynamic.

there is plenty of documentation that backs this videos claim that when people are given the illusion of being "free" they become far more productive.

there is nothing in your examples that the state gave out of benevolence.every example you posted were hard fought battles that were executed by the people.many died to earn those concessions,and they ARE concessions.

as for your final example of "quality of life".this just equates to more comfortable slaves.

the dynamic of employer/master/owner vs slave/peon/worker remains intact.

maybe it is the usage of the term slave that you find offensive?
ok..fair enough.the word is used for dramatic effect i agree.
how about we change the terminology to:power vs powerlessness.

in that context would you find this video more palatable?

Presuming that I don't think it was completely stage managed (I do) or that Russia isn't trying to score cheap points at America's expense (it is).

But again, that doesn't make him wrong. The west, headed by the US, has been putting it's sticky fingers in to the middle east for over 50 years, and it's only gotten worse and worse. How much western equipment now rests in IS hands? How many WMD's did the US find in Iraq? How many innocent people have died in the decades of war waged in the name of what exactly?

You can gussy it up as much as you like, but the US has been preaching the dogma of the greatest nation on earth/leaders of the world for years. Leaders set examples, so I guess it's not a massive surprise that the world is in such a god awful state...

I have little regard for Putin but for most of this dog and pony show, he's pretty much on the money.

http://www.romans322.com/daily-death-rate-statistics.php

You are correct, they do not break down suicide by method, so some portion of that 20k could be guns. There are also 34 mass shooting deaths this year and 726 people shot by police. Then again they didn't add together some of the other items, like all vehicular deaths.

In any case, I was not fudging numbers, I picked the most obvious option and listed it.

In the grand scheme of things, it's not that the deaths from guns don't count, it is that the level of attention paid to them is far and above that paid to other forms of death. It's the same thing with people getting bit by sharks. The total number is incredibly low compared to other deaths or injuries from being in the ocean, but whenever it happens, you will see nothing but that in the headlines. That is what I was trying to say. It sucks that people have died from guns, but if we are going to sensationalize those deaths over others, it is nothing more than an agenda to demonize them.

I am all for implementing more restrictions on guns or other weapons, especially in ways that will make it more difficult for mentally ill people to get their hands on them and also methods that will help police identify guns that have been used in crimes. In many cases, the problem is not totally with the restrictions, but with how lax the enforcement is of the ones that are in place. We need to look at this as well. But the video is not about that, it is about making guns the villain. It is the same thing with semi automatic rifles, people with an agenda will call them things like "Military weaponry", "Assault Rifles", and "Automatic Machine Guns". They use buzz words to make them seem more than they are and yet you have clueless people like Joe Biden who says things like "get a shotgun", not realizing that a shotgun can easily wound and kill people faster than a semi auto rifle.

As far as the 'helpful' gun statistics, I would consider them to be subjective based on the situation. I found this site: http://gunssavelives.net/incident-map/, which might or might not be accurate. I wouldn't rely on it, because I don't know what they use for verification.

In any case, as I stated before, I don't mind regulations. I would mind bans and it is clear that many of the more hardcore anti gun people want that to be the end game.

Seven people have died after a Hawker Hunter jet crashed into several vehicles during Shoreham Airshow.

So....technically *snuff

wow,this video is getting way more comments than expected.

some are saying the semi sped up.
i do not see any evidence of this.if this trucker shifted and hit the gas..you would know it,i am partially deaf and i would know it.
i do,however,see conditions further up that precipitate the lane slowing down,which of course will give the illusion the trucker is speeding up.

i am not that interested in the legalese as some of you are,considering that lawful right or wrong are meaningless when people can die.

i am far more concerned with safety.
maybe if the trucker was not on the phone he would have noticed captain retard inching in and could have responded appropriately i.e:downshift..let off the gas.(NOT jam the brakes,unless you want a scene from the A-team).

conclusion=fail

maybe if speedy gonzales didn't treat a 40 ton big rig as a normal 2 ton car that had the ability to defy the laws of physics and just assumed that he/she would be let in by mr nice rig master,maybe they would not have 5k worth of body work on their car.

conclusion=fail

this could have gone so much worse than it did,and for that i am glad.

it still bothers me how some drivers deal with semi big-rigs.they truly are clueless and endanger not only themselves but everybody on the highway around them by their impatient and selfish driving.

Yes, millions of unvaccinated peopled did survive, and still do. Congratulations to you and your son for being among those.

But millions have also died. In 1980, before widespread vaccination, about 2.6 million people died of measles. [1] In 2013, about 145,000 people still died from measles globally, most under the age of 5.

I know people who smoked but did not get lung cancer. I know people who do not wear a seat belt but have not died in a car accident. These anecdotes do not bring back the millions of people whose early death could have been prevented. Easily prevented.

[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/