@bcglorf
this video is from larken rose,a seriously devout libertarian.
he views statism as a form a religion,and that if a state is given too much power it will always lead to a form of tyranny.

i didn't post this as some kind of statement,or that the content reflects my own philosophy or ideals,but i try to understand all points of view to the best of my ability,even if i disagree.

so i am not making the case for when it is ok to shoot a cop,but i find larken's arguments compelling on a philosophical level.

because he does have a point in regards to america's hyper-militarized policing over the past decade.that is something that should concern us all.

anyways,for me it is just hearing a viewpoint from a different camp other than my own,and i thought his argument interesting.

I'm not a professional debater, everything I have said has been my honest point of view, and at least I have been fairly civil during our discourse.

In almost every post, you accuse me of trying to spread falsehoods, make claims about my intelligence, and generally come off as accusatory towards me as a person. Like I said, I don't do this professionally and I never took debate in school, so perhaps this is what people do when they are discussing an issue they disagree upon. I simply do not know.

Perhaps I should have referred to encouraged instead of forced, I do not believe they were encouraged specifically to come here. If they had access to a similar country, with a similar standard of living, and with a porous border they might have went there. Again, I don't know.

Yes, businesses in the United States took advantage of their labor to make more profits. How is that my fault? I don't own a business, I don't employ illegals, and I am a common middle class citizen. I can't pick and choose where I shop, where I eat, or other daily lifestyle choices based off of what people businesses are hiring. I am comfortable in my savings, but only the truly upper class elite can try to spend extraordinary amounts of their discretionary income to avoid getting products sourced from places they might disagree with. The sad thing is, at least in my experience, is that those people are far more likely to directly exploit the labor of illegals as nannies, builders, or lawnscapers.

In any case, as I mentioned earlier, I respect your opinions even if I don't share them. Have a wonderful weekend.

Its basically all in the video, there are physical barriers already out there, it is a long term problem that has been improving lately, there is probably not much more protection a big wall would provide over a symbolic fence (only effect is length of tunnel/ladder required). Everyone agrees on illegal vs. legal, prostitution and drugs can not be eradicated, only limited, by making the little girls illegal you push them in peril. One could improve the situation by cooperating with the government of Mexico and border states, border towns, by making the legal waiting line clear and bearable, Trump is the elephant in the porcelain shop on all of this, making things worse.

Simple solutions to complicated problems... never mind.

Are americans really competing with illegal immigrants for jobs?
Is it that hard to get an education in the US that would get you past the dish-washing stage? IDK.

Why are the rules for employing illegal imigrants so hard to uphold? Could it be because it is impossible? Because no-one else would be willing to do the work for the money available in the local economy? How would the overall situation change if rules on "legalising" some of these people were relaxed instead of tightened? If they can hold a job for months or years without commiting any law violations besides going past the validity of their work permit they deserve at the very least permanent residence over all the trash living on social security just because they were born a few miles north.

If they are living and working and not doing any wrong, you should keep them regardless of... whatever.

BTW I happen to agree with what you wrote about that commercial 100%, Bob. Just probably from a different point of view. Its propaganda fairy-telling without a good point.

If I really wanted to move to the US I would make absolutely sure I had a plan on what to do there. Not just get in at all costs. Like the Budweiser guy (but better beer).

Nope, me neither.

Which is sort of the point. It's unheard of that all of these agencies came to the same conclusion on a specific matter. Some may take this as an indicator of how damning the evidence really is, others see this as an indicator that the "assessments" were made on hierarchical levels reserved for political appointees.

The absence of dissent supports the second point of view. No group of analysts in their right mind would create a report without also strongly pointing out contradictory facts, inconsistencies, and separating fact from interpretation. That's what Hersh is referring to. This is not an NIE, it's an opinion piece. This memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (wierd name) goes down the same route:

As you will have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing operation is no better than the “intelligence” evidence in 2002-2003 – expressed then with comparable flat-fact “certitude” – of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, an opinion piece might be sufficient if it came from credible institutions and had a moderatly important subject. But this is throwing serious accusations at a sovereign nation in times when diplomatic relations are stressed as it is. And that's not going into the credibility problem of many of these agencies, who have a very dubious track record on these issues.

Ian Welsh had a piece the other day on the CIA vs Trump, and his take on intelligence agencies is pretty close to what mine has been since I learned about the Stasi some 20 years ago:

The CIA and NSA are not the friend of any left-wing worth having: they are innately anti-democratic, anti-privacy, and anti-rights. Secret agencies are anathema to any open government. At an existential level, intelligence agencies are at best a double edged sword, and by their nature, they always wind up serving the interests of the few, against the interests of the people.

BobKnight? Your response?

You believe these "Veritas" guys, right? So, when they're proven criminals, do you still back them? Have your lies caught up with you?

Yeah, I know, you're going to give this comment thread a miss. Anything that doesn't support your point of view is to be dismissed out of hand. If that's not a plausible answer it's simply ignored.

tldr: The decisions made in creating and rearing offspring are subject to a different set of moral criteria than all others because those decisions affect everyone.

Here's the problem with that thought. You didn't just make a decision that affected your life. Or even one that affected the lives of yourself and others you know. You intentionally created another sentient being. Because of human nature, that sentient being is now not just your responsibility, but everyone else's as well. Your decision quite literally affected the entire species. Or should I say infected.

There is no other decision anyone can make that has such an extent of repercussions (with the possible exception of murder). Whether you further choose to be responsible for your offspring is, from a decision making point of view, completely separate from the decision to create that offspring. And likewise, the decisions you make regarding the care of that offspring are entirely separate from the decision to create it. Those decisions are, whether you like it or not, subject to critique. You may not like it, and you may in fact see the entire process (conception, birth, weaning, rearing, etc...) as a single act. Either way, the entirety of the species is now constrained by your initial act of creation. The question is not whether you are a “good parent”. The question is how much of a burden upon or boon to the species will you be.

Just to make this contrast clear…. if I, as thinking adult, decide to consume alcohol in such excess that it causes my liver to fail, I can ask the species to help me to the point of giving me a new liver - which may or may not be granted based on my own words and actions. If you ask a similar favor on behalf your offspring, however, it’s an entirely different moral calculus.

*Promote because I think Izzo's points of view are interesting.
Agree with everything about policing, I don't, but I do enjoy the views from both sides and I think it's important to keep the conversation open.
We can't just turn off the conversation when it's not going in one direction or another. I think Izzo brings a lot about policing to the table. Agree or disagree, that's fine, but lets hear both sides.
Both sides are important if we want to understand/discuss, fix or otherwise understand what is going on.

Do you know who "those people" are? I don't.

There are some people whose ideology is easily identified and most likely well-entrenched: KKK, white supremacists, nazis, take your pick. They are difficult to talk to and even more difficult to persuade.

I happen to live near a popular gathering spot for nazis (real nazis, not just someone you don't like) and have tried many times over the years: it's no bueno.

But that's only the hard core, a fraction of the ~60 million votes for Trump. If you put all of them into the corner of shame and refuse to interact with them, much less try to understand their point of view, you'll never know their reasoning for voting the way they did. You'll only push them away, reinforcing any feeling of being left behind or ignored by the, for a lack of a better word, liberals. That's no bueno either. Want to see how that turns out? Look at the state of Brandenburg in Germany.

You can either try to breach their echo chamber in an attempt to convince them of your perspective or you'll end up with either an even more divided country than before or a second Trump presidency (or Trump 2.0). It's an uncomfortable thing to do, but looking at the emergence of safe spaces, trigger warnings, blatant groupthink and whatnot on certain university campuses, some people seem to have become outright allergic towards differing opinions -- that's highly unhealthy for a society.

Finally, some hope: http://www.politico.eu/pro/belgian-regional-government-set-to-block-eu-canada-trade-deal/

In a sign of increasing frustration on the Canadian side, the normally cheery Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Thursday that not signing CETA would issue a “deplorable” message that Europe is heading towards an “unproductive path” post-Brexit.

Deplorable, you say?

The fact that power over trade — one of the EU’s core negotiating competences — has shifted to Europe’s 38 national and regional parliaments is a major embarrassment for Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. In July, he was pushed by French and German Socialists into designating CETA as a “mixed agreement” requiring ratification in national and regional assemblies.
(...)
The decision was highly controversial, because Juncker and his chief lawyers believed this wasn’t necessary from a legal point of view, but was a gesture of political goodwill.

A gesture of political goodwill. Or as we call it: a Hail-Mary attempt at keeping it alive, because both the French and the German government are facing serious domestic pressure on this issue. If they hadn't acknowledged parliament's vote on this, CETA might have been taken out back and shot in the head already, like it fucking should be.

It would require a very narrow point of view to appreciate this peace. I doubt that's what the artist intended!

Isn't it so much more fun to actually exchange information and points of view, rather than getting snotty? I love it.

Maybe we are talking a bit at cross purposes. (Like, that has never happened before on teh intertubes, right?)

I try not to "re-edit" or "re-imagine" videos. I'm sure I do it -- I often do things that I later complain that other people do. This comment goes back more to your first response to me, however it applies to this comment, too. The idea that the video would be better if it this'd, or that'd, or it fails to do this other thing that it wasn't even trying to do. The concept of being conscious of "the bigger picture" is what I am addressing here.

However, isn't it just YOUR vision of what the bigger picture is that you say is missing? Because for me, I see a bigger picture being addressed quite nicely -- the vision that the video maker set out to address.

I wonder if the nebulous nature of your instinctive dislike to this video is indeed EXACTLY what the video maker was setting out to illuminate? Or rather, decided to be not obsequious to? Like women have been taught to be obsequious for eons?

I notice that you are sure that your difficult-to-describe instinctive reactions are "correct." What if it is actually your own internalized and unexamined sexism? I know you say thunderfoot bugs you, too. I also know that all my impassioned information about how women across cultures and time are expected to "tone it down" wasn't addressed in your response to me.

That is the elephant in the room here, as far as I am concerned. Sure, "condescension" is gender neutral. The whole video, though, is about sexism and the unconscious ways that it leaks out. I don't see you addressing that in your response -- except maybe, MAYBE, it is this nebulous and difficult thing you are struggling to understand and maybe, MAYBE, it needs to be examined and understood.

So maybe look at your feelings through that prism?

I say this as someone who has their own internalized sexism (towards men and women both) that I am constantly trying to identify and own and uproot. Racism, too. I so want to be the person who, like Stephen Colbert of old, who doesn't see race. And yet I do and I am mortified by it and I try to push through that lizard brain instinct and the training of my youth.

Something to think about maybe?

Or not. Maybe it just is as simple as you don't like the humor in the video, and I do. There are differences in taste, after all.

I suspect, though, that it is much more complex than that -- as you said, "maybe I'm going into it with the notion that I'm going to be offended anyway."

Both Trump and Hillary are horrible candidates. The only way either can get elected is by people being fooled into believing only two parties are a viable option.

Buy their point of view and forever be a slave to it.

I know this channel from about 2 month ago. I am one of his subscriber.
That time I watched this video and like it. Then he asked us if we can we share it and i see fair enough because its good video in my point of view.

So Newtboy, would attempting to burn all this methane as it is released(converting to CO2) be a possible solution, assuming it was possible from an engineering point of view? Apart from that, maybe bioengineered organisms designed to eat the methane could make an impact.

I'm not hopeful, but I'm pretty sure there are enough ultra-rich people with the resources to save a small portion of humanity while the earth in uninhabitable for 100 years, that humans will not die out. Viruses are hard to kill(according to Agent Smith)

My general point was that it doesn't matter if they are better off. For example, the degree to which they are better off might not be significant to them and their life. Or they might know even know they would be better off because their life doesn't include unbiased news sources. Or they see the leaked emails as proof that whilst she SAYS things that benefit you, once you vote for her she will do what she likes. Or whatever other worries people might have - only they know and no one in the political sphere seems to care.

The less you have, the less you have to lose, the less involved you are with the system, coupled with access to education and all the rest (especially in America). You are convinced they'd be better off, but they are not and therein lies the problem. Things like the email leak make it a lot harder to convince them of your point of view.

If your house has rot and every time you ask to have it fixed, your landlady holds it together with spit and tape, eventually you've got a shit house that isn't any better than living outside and putting a match to the whole thing is the only way it's going to be rebuilt.

It depends on your perspective on whether the house is already fucked or not, doesn't it? You might live in one of the nice rooms, but someone else further down the ladder is basically living outside.

You only have to look at the way inequality has risen over the past few decades to see how desperate some people are. You can see how someone sleeping in their car, going to a foodbank and coping with mental illness might not see much urgency in choosing between Trump or Hillary.