If it were left to the moderates - and you are not one, you are the other extreme - then change would never happen, because no one would be angry enough. How far would the abuse have to go, how rife would it have to be, before you got angry enough to try and change it? During the height of racism in america, you would have wondered why the million man march was necessary given that you never had any problems on your traffic stops.

I have read comments from newt praising the actions of the police when they act in ways which deserve praise.

Yet you - you never seem to rule out that a beating is unacceptable. You always add the caveat "maybe he wasn't putting his hands behind his back," (or similar) but in the same breath claim that you've never been in that situation. Perhaps if you had, you would understand that the human survival instinct is not something that can be turned off when you are being attacked.

Do you honestly, even in your closeted, warped and twisted mind, think that you can kick and punch someone in the face UNTIL they put their hands behind their back? You are excusing them on the basis that they make an impossible demand and the demand is not met.

Your guarantee is worthless, on what authority do you make it!? You have a pathetically ignorant world view in which if it works for you, it works for everyone - damn the evidence, and damn those who it doesn't work for. If your traffic stops went without a hitch, then all these videos of psychopaths in uniform are outliers and don't need to be dealt with. You're an excuse maker and an apologist for violent, dangerous individuals who are given exceptional power which they abuse.

Unless some people get angry about it, nothing will change, because people like you will always find a justification for them, and that's more reason to get angry.

That is as factual as any of it. If people enter hell because they don't worship the correct god in the correct way, but have no way to tell which way/god is correct, or if any is, that is no fault of their own. If your proclaimed system was fair, god needs to come to each person and make them KNOW his truth, then offer them the choice to reject it. That's not what happens, no matter how many rainbows and sunsets you see.

I won't go to hell then, and neither will any real atheist. I've never seen/heard/read anything convincing about any religion...ever. I don't 'know there's a god' or right way to worship, it seems far more likely there isn't. I say this with all honesty and not because it's somehow convenient or I'm 'angry at god'. I did not 'reject' him, I don't think he exists to reject.

Mathew 7:14 seems to repeat what I said, it's incredibly hard to find the way into heaven and most people won't find the way...according to your brand of religion. It's not that they reject the way, they can't find it, even though many looked with vigor.

No, it's like some guy telling you in the courtroom hallway that the judge will say that, but no one has ever seen it happen, or even seen the judge or what happens after your case is heard, there are no ex cons at all anywhere. This is the same guy that's telling you what the law is, but make no mistake, he's not a lawyer and he's telling you things that make no sense at all (like the judge will let you off for murder if you just SAY you won't do it again).
I don't think even the most hard core murderers and rapist have NO remorse, only the true psychopaths and they're rare.

When I die and god and Jesus are there asking me questions and telling me what the rules really were, I'll believe in them and say so clearly, and admit I was wrong. Not a nano second before they prove themselves though.

Ahhh, but did we have a flat EKG and brain scan on Jesus to prove he even died? ;-)
Also, yes, 3 days later! If you eat poorly prepared blowfish you can go into a total paralysis that looks like death, and come out of it 3 days later +-! It's how Voodoo practitioners probably made 'zombies'. That doesn't happen every day, but often enough that you can't bury people in Japan right away if they eat sushi.

Still sounds like a logical fallacy to me, with some people shoving their heads in the sand to avoid seeing it. I say you can't have it both ways, the punishment is eternity in hell and Jesus should have stayed no matter how special he and his pops are, and since he left (after less than 3 days? pussy!), he didn't even take the punishment he expects humans to, forget taking that amount of punishment for each person. Saying he's 'special' so he didn't have to is ridiculous and shows the mind bending mental acrobatics you must do to make sense of this. It reminds me of the 'I'm too rich to have to go to prison' defense.

Oh, I see, I misunderstood what you were saying about the soul.

People who can't tell right from wrong are called "psychopath" or "sociopath" (different places tell me these are the same thing or different things; I don't care). Those people need some kind of guidance to fit in. If they accept a religious god that gives them orders to be good, then they might follow them.

They'd be better off having a professional explain to them how to determine if others will consider their actions good or bad.

Yes, it's called Psychopathy, or Anti-Social Personality Disorder.

It doesn't mean you go around killing people (though it certainly lowers the bar!)

Here's a good article about a scientist studying the characteristics of psychopathic brains who accidentally found out that he was a psychopath. He'd never realized it, because everything in life had gone his way, but once he saw what he was, he reflected and found things he'd done without any guilt that ordinary people might have dwelt on (or not done in the first place).

As I understand it, Psychopathy (or ASPD) means that there's no empathy for other people. They can't read emotions like the rest of us can, and so they see other people almost like unfeeling robots. In extreme cases, the psychopath believes they are the only real person in a world of automatons and they think no more of other people than you or I would think of plant life. There's a range, this isn't an absolute on or off switch. About 10% of the male population and 1% of the female population has it to some degree (much higher in politics and executive offices).

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/?no-ist

In my opinion, the people who mercilessly shoot dogs are simply Wild-West enthusiasts who go out on a daily basis desperate for the opportunity to use their deadly weapon. It's an us-vs-them attitude, and it makes their own job harder, which makes them act tougher, compounding the problem. The spirit of the frontier lives on in the minds of these bullies, and even if they are in the minority it means that there are armed and dangerous psychopaths walking around with the protection of the state. And if you even consider defending yourself, you're being killed or sent away for the long haul.

The answer he gave @5:40 was shocking.

Psychopath.

We really need some kind of "report" function for psychopaths who wish people dead.

If you can't make a cogent argument then stop typing. Please.

So many things wrong with this argument...

A. I don't see politicians going around shooting people with guns, so what on earth does this have to do with the topic?!
B. Yes, yes, we have an epidemic of children getting killed with explosives right now. No, that's right... we have school SHOOTINGS... you know... WITH GUNS! And what do we do about crazy people with explosives?! Have everyone else carry explosives?!
C. Yes, you are correct... not everyone just wants your TV. Yes, in some cases, they're psychopaths, and you'd be better off with a gun than society having sweeping gun control. Also, in a small fraction of car accidents, wearing a seat belt could actually kill you, too.

Do you see the problem with your argument? The very fact that we all can get guns so easily, and the fact they are so pervasive increases the chances of someone having a gun who would like to attack you, and you having a gun doesn't make up for that increased chance. So you can site individual situations all you want, but statistics are readily available that show beyond a shadow of a doubt that sweeping gun control does overall make you safer.
D. Pretty sure his argument wasn't that we need gun control with our military.
E. It's naive of you to believe you're "protecting yourself" by owning a gun, when we know society is safer with sweeping gun control.

So we don't mind psychopaths as long as they are 'our' psychopaths, but if they're pathological liars can can we ever really be sure that they really are 'ours'?

i'm going to trust the >95% of the relevant scientific community over a self justifying video clip with no sources from a group backed by categorically vapid psychopaths tucker carlson and dick cheney.

There are plenty of times when I've had both the means and motivation to kill someone. What stopped me? Yeah, I didn't want to go to jail, but primarily I stopped myself because I know that killing someone is wrong and that cutting me off in traffic is not a morally justifiable reason for murder.

As for your marriage, that's a perfect example of how your argument falls apart. Are you telling me that there would be no repercussions on your life if you got caught cheating on your wife? Because unless your wife would just roll her eyes and go "oh asexymind, you and your crazy extramarital affairs", you are being coerced and therefore your decision to not sleep with all the women lining up outside your door is not virtuous.

Just because there are negative consequences to an action, doesn't mean that not performing that action isn't the virtuous path.

But bloody hell, do we need those negative consequences! You only have to look at the finance industry to see how people behave when there are no repercussions.

We don't live in an abstract philosophical conundrum where people will be moral "if we just give them the chance!!!"

We live in a world that has been ceaselessly fucked over by the powerful. Where the poor get exploited and the environment gets destroyed because the majority of those in power (and I don't mean politicians, I mean the people with power) are complete psychopaths, in the clinical sense of the word. If we didn't have government rules, you'd still be working on the weekend and your kids would be working with you.

This seemed pointless. They tried to make the event more impactful by overdramatizing it (showing the cop talking to his wife about their daughter, drawing out the gunfight, having the cop mention his family right before getting killed, etc) but it just made it feel like a cheesy Hollywood drama. The actual dashcam footage is way, way more impactful and really shows how sudden and brutal murder can be.

It's all too easy to hate cops (and authority figures in general) but it's also easy to forget that even a routine traffic stop can be a life-or-death situation. Cops have no idea who is behind the wheel. It could be a soccer mom or it could be a violent psychopath.

I saw the first one when it came out, more out of curiosity than anything else. I was a big transformers fan as a kid, but I wasn't expecting much from Bay. Even my low expectations weren't met.

Tonight, by coincidence, Dark of the Moon was on TV. "Maybe I'm being too hard" I thought. I mean, they're only glorified toy commercials anyway, right? Maybe I'm guilty of just jumping on the Bay-hate band wagon...

Nope.

Aside from being a completely un-fucking-watchable mess, it was just boring. How the hell do you spend that much money (and the money clearly didn't go on writers or actors), have that many explosions and still have it be boring?

I didn't like JJ Abrams new Star Trek movies, but at lest he was in trying (in his own half-assed, ham-fisted way) to pay homage to the property. Bay clearly hates this whole concept. He hates the characters, the design, the plot lines, he's not even really interested in the central concept of robots that bloody transform. And to top it all off, you couldn't even let kids watch this. Instead of the noble, if naïve leader of the 80s, Optimus is just a dick here. And a psychopathic one too. He flat out murders his defeated enemy at the end.

FFS, if it's a terrible movie and you can't use it to sell toys to kids..what is the goddamn point of its existence?

That Dershowitz guy is a total rat. He's the one who brought state power down on Norman Finkelstein.
He's a cynical, self serving dishonest psychopath playing at respectable academic.
It does not surprise me at all he's the MAN's choice to try to shout down Greenwald. Harvard's credibility is shot to pieces.

I'd say that once someone as committed mass murder, we no longer need to be so politically correct. Terms like "psycho," "maniac" and "lunatic" are perfectly fine. I believe it would be helpful to draw a firmer line between the typically harmless mentally ill people who deserve sympathy and support and those who have crossed the line to become irredeemable violent psychopaths.

Oh, and Stormsinger, I think the name you're looking for is probably "Johnson."