and while I'm at it, Chevy Chase sucks!

actually, no, I can't say that. He's awesome on Community

>> ^Fletch:

>> ^ChaosEngine:
>> ^Fletch:
>> ^Engels:
Oh look, formulaic drek leaping in to exploit the hunger games mania! Yay!

Requisite nonsensical contrarian vomitus. I'm guessing SNL hasn't been funny since the seventies, either.

IMHO, SNL was never funny. It had funny people, some of whom went on to do funny things, but the show itself was always mediocre.

[whoosh!]

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^Fletch:
>> ^Engels:
Oh look, formulaic drek leaping in to exploit the hunger games mania! Yay!

Requisite nonsensical contrarian vomitus. I'm guessing SNL hasn't been funny since the seventies, either.

IMHO, SNL was never funny. It had funny people, some of whom went on to do funny things, but the show itself was always mediocre.

[whoosh!]

>> ^Fletch:

>> ^Engels:
Oh look, formulaic drek leaping in to exploit the hunger games mania! Yay!

Requisite nonsensical contrarian vomitus. I'm guessing SNL hasn't been funny since the seventies, either.


IMHO, SNL was never funny. It had funny people, some of whom went on to do funny things, but the show itself was always mediocre.

>> ^Engels:

Oh look, formulaic drek leaping in to exploit the hunger games mania! Yay!

Requisite nonsensical contrarian vomitus. I'm guessing SNL hasn't been funny since the seventies, either.

Read the description. "Video from the seventies and older have a home here."

Hmmm. Nit-picking? Anything form the eighties would be considered vintage to some-Is there some stone-clad consensus?

Please, put it on whatever channel makes you feel satisfactorily empowered and enjoy the tune! ) I defer to your tenure and ball sack. (edit) Ok. So you got a reaction/response.

Brilliance (and, for me, essence of pure childhood) fueled by some serious high-grade Seventies. I haven't seen a cooler jam since breakfast.

Sorry for the reeeaaally long post @marinara but I was trying to be brief:

1. "Zimmerman was not part of any REGISTERED neighborhood watch group."

Zimmerman did indeed say that he was "captain" of his neighborhood watch, and I can't find any proof that he wasn't, do you know why? Because there is no documentation regarding his neighborhood watch program, because it was unregistered and existed only in the heads of two or three people. And, might I add, it was certainly not "official".

When a person forms a neighborhood watch, it might be important to take into account the community that they live in. What if the community doesn't want a neighborhood watch program? What if they do, but they feel they don't want you representing them, as some people in Zimmerman's community clearly felt?

The fact is that Zimmmerman's self-appointed title carried no legitimacy at all. If my friend Cletus and I want to call ourselves the neighborhood watch, we can. I can call myself "secretary treasurer" and he can call himself "supreme overlord". But it has no more meaning than when my friend Nick and I get together and call ourselves a "fourteenth level archer", and "Nargok, the dwarven battlemage" (respectively). Only, in the case of the neighborhood watch titles, one must consider the community they are attempting to represent. This is why most watch programs (like the one you linked to) register themselves with the National Sheriff's Association, or some other organization.

2. "Oh and I documented a procedure for neighborhood watches to arrest people and a simple google search will correct you of the idea that the watch should not carry guns."

What you documented on the "City of Oxnard, Police Department" website was that citizen watch volunteers (who are registered) are encouraged to make arrests when they have seen a crime being committed, in particular, when they see someone committing the crime of vandalism. All US citizens have the right to make a citizen's arrest, but no one has the right to arrest or detain anyone for "suspicious behavior", even if that person is walking down the street wearing a hoodie, and looking skeptically at the person following them.

As to the gun, the same Oxnard website you linked to, on the same page, advises that no one carry a weapon at all, except for a heavy-duty flashlight that might be used to defend one's self in an emergency. Unfortunately, a Google search relating to neighborhood watch organizations carrying guns is inundated with articles and polls regarding this tragic case. The fox news polls indicate that a minority of people questioned think neighborhood watch members should carry guns, but those people do not reflect the views of any actual organization (that exists outside of its member's heads) that I know of.

I'd like to refer you to the response to the NY Times from Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels. The Angels are one of the most prolific watch organizations in history, with chapters all over the world. They were founded in the late seventies in NYC when the areas they patrolled were considered wastelands. Despite several attempts on the founder's life, and the loss of a few of its members over the years, they still do not advise carrying guns.

3. "...why do you insist on saying martin was an unarmed child? This is absurd."

I say it for two reasons: the first is that Martin was unarmed. There are no eyewitness reports, or even statements from Zimmerman that I've heard, that indicate that Martin attempted to use his bag of Skittles or his can of iced-tea as a weapon. The second reason I say it is that according to the US legal system, Martin was still a child at the time of his death. If he were in the "Child Protective Services' program, he wouldn't have gotten out until he was eighteen, which is the age that US citizens officially become adults (unless they're insane). Some children are tried as adults in the US, but child-victims are never represented as adults.

I understand if you think it's more appropriate to refer to Martin as a teenager, or possibly an adolescent, or even a young adult. But I don't think so, and I'll tell you why: I'm thirty-one years old. I'm not much older by comparison, but when I see a seventeen-year-old kid, I rarely think to myself, "he's got everything figured out". In fact, I rarely think that about most adults. Sure, I think most kids are smarter than people give them credit for, but I don't think Martin was mature enough to know the law and develop an appropriate response to being pursued for no reason by a man armed with a gun. And the US legal system hasn't made a determination in his case yet anyway.

Maybe I'm just speaking out of my ass, but I think it's unfair to loop Ganghi in with these other two. As far as I know, Ganghi was not a child molester, although he did experiment with chastity or whatever the hell he called it; he slept with girls in his bed, even his own grandniece. Fucked up that may be, but it is not sexual abuse, and it was for a small portion of his life, until his family basically told him that it was creepy. And it wasn't for decades, it was for a few years in his seventies. And in the 1940's, 70 was old as fuck. Someone could've probably stopped it a lot sooner.

Of course, I could be wrong, I could be blinded by the myth. I don't think so, but it's certainly possible. Either way, the above coupled with the fact that he might have been a little racist just does not equate with torturing people to death, or with consigning a third of the population of Africa for the last twenty years to die from AIDS.

Even if Gandhi was as fucked up as this pic claims, his way of approaching a situation with non-violence was absolutely a positive contribution to humanity. I doubt that we would've had the civil rights reforms here in America when we did without Gandhi's work.

Shit, even MLK was an adulterer. The first mistake is assuming that anyone is perfect. And the second is thinking that anyone's contributions to humanity are worthless because they also had serious problems.

#vintage:

"Here is where we put our best clips from decades past. Video from the seventies and older have a home here....wonderful bits of old music, art, silver screen, animation, television are here also and more!

Succumb to the nostalgia and enjoy!"

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Shark, Song, Seventies, Spoof Trailer, Comedy, LOLs' to 'Shark, Song, Seventies, Spoof Trailer, Comedy, LOLs, disney' - edited by ponceleon

One of the fundamental tenants of Christianity is that all human beings are "morally compromised". All have sinned and fallen short of perfection. A true Christian person makes no attempt to deny the fact that they are morally compromised, flawed, or imperfect. Religious people humbly acknowledge their faults, and bring them to God. They rely on Christ's atonement for forgiveness. Then they try as much as they can to abandon the faults, and fix whatever damage they may have caused. And after they have done all this - they admit readily that they are STILL morally compromised beings and that they have to keep doing this process over and over and over and over and over seventy-times-seven.

So this guy's argument really is somewhat laughable on its face. He thinks he is somehow scoring a point, when in fact he is only reinforcing the Bible's underlying message. Those who beleive in God are not insulted, or put off, or otherwise effected. We see his position merely as a rather quaint, and amusingly miscast reminder of the real message taught by the Book of Job. And what is that message (to inform our non-believer friends?) "No matter how good you may be or how much you may have, you must always be humble and remember that you need of God in your life." I think this guy needs that message as much as anyone. Some of you guys too.

subsidizing big business friends that don't need the subsidy or tax break may be the place to look for that

Places like Illinois, California, Wisconsin, and New Jersey are not facing fiscal black-holes because they are paying too much in subsidies to ‘big business friends’. The main problem is that they have promised government workers a gold-plated lifestyle when they only had a copper-plated budget. You could end every ‘big business’ tax break, subsidy, and kickback tomorrow and it would not even make a dent in the budget shortfalls of states like Illinois. The problem is government over-spending. Here it is in black and white. This isn’t ‘left or right’. This isn’t ‘liberal or conservative’. This is just the brutal, harsh, cold reality…

http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Illinois_state_budget#Public_Employees

You will notice that Illinois’ budget is NOT dominated by a big line item of ‘subsidies to big business’. The budget is dominated by government spending on unions, union benefits, and entitlements. The only way to ‘fix’ such a budget is to cut the spending. Really. Because for every 12 people living in Illinois, there is one full-time salaried government worker pulling a higher wage, more benefits, and a better retirement than the people paying for him. Such a system is economically impossible to support. And there is plenty of evidence that such systems will ALWAYS collapse because of ineffiency. Greece, Italy, Portugal – entire nations are collapsing because of exactly the same problem. And that problem is the poison of Keynesian economics propping up an impossibly lavish public sector.

That's basically my point, this country has plenty of money, it just does it's that people are greedy as **** so they're going to say that only THIS slice of the pie is available for you guys

You are talking as if the public sector is NOT getting its ‘piece of the pie’…

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2011/09/14/study-finds-public-employee-compensation-better-than-private-sector.html

http://www.aei.org/docLib/AEI-Working-Paper-on-Federal-Pay-May-2011.pdf

It's just not true, public service unions have nothing to do with the crisis, when you look at the fact that we're in two Wars and spend double what the entire world spends on the armed forces

To say public unions have 'nothing' to do with the economic shortfalls is just factually incorrect. The links above prove it. Illinois has entire sections of its budget dominated by union issues, and union contracts repeatedly block any attempts at reform.

But regardless... Sure. Cut federal defense spending. And while we are at it, we should also cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and every other program. Cut them all. Slash them by 33% across the board. No exceptions. No mercy. But anyone that thinks that the only place we need to cut is ‘defense’ and that’ll fix it all it living in a dream world.

For example – how is cutting defense spending going to help Illinois? Or California? Or New Jersey? Or let’s take it national. Greece’s defense spending was a measley 3.4%. Explain how they would solve their massive budget shortfall by cutting defense. Or the US… Even if you cut US defense spending to zero, our current deficit is over 1.4 trillion. Defense to zero? 700 billion. Only HALF of just the deficit. It doesn’t even touch the 14 trillion in debt the nation already has. Or the further SEVENTY trillion in debt we have to cover all the 'unfunded liabilites' of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

At some point all the prog-libs out there are going to have to accept the facts. You can’t close the massive budget shortfalls that cities, states, and nations have with defense cuts. The problem is not defense. It is not ‘big business’. The problem is that governments are overspending on unsustainable public employee packages and entitlements that have no reasonable expecation of ever being paid for.

>> ^RhesusMonk:

True story:
Halloween tenth grade, I'm walking out of my house as Bob Marley. Torn jeans, ratty t-shirt, seventy dollar wig of dreads (it was the wig that made the costume, it was kinda perfect), and of course black face cuz I'm from NYC and who could possibly think a smart liberal kid is racist? My mother chases me down with a telephone, stumbling with the cord all wrapped around her, yelling at me to talk to her friend. I take the phone and her Panamanian best friend screams at me to STOP RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!, like I'm about to walk in front of a train or something. Long story (and there was a very long convo about the irony and political statement of the whole thing) I washed my face.


Pussy.

True story:

Halloween tenth grade, I'm walking out of my house as Bob Marley. Torn jeans, ratty t-shirt, seventy dollar wig of dreads (it was the wig that made the costume, it was kinda perfect), and of course black face cuz I'm from NYC and who could possibly think a smart liberal kid is racist? My mother chases me down with a telephone, stumbling with the cord all wrapped around her, yelling at me to talk to her friend. I take the phone and her Panamanian best friend screams at me to STOP RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!, like I'm about to walk in front of a train or something. Long story (and there was a very long convo about the irony and political statement of the whole thing) I washed my face.

Hmmm....

Now, is this actually a nasty troll against women?

Kind of. Sort of. Not really, but kinda sorta.

I shall write a little essay on the relative value of words, to explain.

I was in my late teens when the Feminist Movement of the seventies was getting going. This was a time of women reclaiming language.

Women were described as "Miss or Mrs". Men were "Mr", with no designation as to their marital status. Just "Mr". So women came up with "Ms". No indication of marital status. The word was chosen to have an equal "value" to Mr.

We were also struggling with being called "girl" rather than "woman."

I got into many conversations, trying to convince folks that calling a grown woman a "girl" is very insulting. I heard many different reasons why it is okay to call a woman that, and I eventually figured out a logical response to each of those reasons.

It came down to a simple test.

Say something about a woman, calling her a "girl". Now change the gender -- would you say the same thing about man and be able to use the word "boy"? Or does it sound completely insulting to call a man a boy in that situation?

Example:

"I'll have my girl get back to you on that" when meaning your 51-year-old support staff person. Would you say "I'll have my boy get back to you on that." Think you would do it? How about if your support staff person is a black man? Now try it. Really drawl out that "boy", Southern it up big time.

NO. FUCKING. WAY.

If you would not call a black man a "boy", you got no business calling a grown woman a "girl."

It's okay to use girl sometimes, just as it is okay to use boy. "Boys' Night Out." "Girls' Night Out." Equal value phrases. No problem with "girl" if you can substitute "boy" and not feel weird.

So here we have rottenseed's eloquence.

"tits cunts cocks balls"

Nicely balanced, two sexual characteristics for each gender. They aren't the same area of the body, but that is just a reflection of the realities of anatomy. Our stuff is top and bottom, men have their stuff in the same place.

The only thing that sits badly is the word "cunt." That word doesn't have a male equivalent in rottenseed's attempt to be balanced. A truly balanced word would have been something like vay jay jay, or even @Lann's cooter. Cooter is a sweet term.

The word "cunt" has been used too long and too often as a pejorative to dismiss an entire woman as being just a body part, to shame her, to silence her, to reduce her to irrelevance. It wasn't that long ago that you wouldn't even hear or see the word -- it was spelled down to C-Word, and everyone knew what horrible thing had been said. Can't say that is true with the words "cocks" and "balls."

So "cunt" doesn't have a matched value word on the male side of this triumph of eloquence.

Women are starting to reclaim the word "cunt" for themselves, just as Eve Ensler made it okay to say vagina. I know you younger folks might be surprised to know this, but it wasn't that long ago NO ONE EVER said vagina. Penis was okay, but the word vagina was whispered and suggested and disguised (Lann's cooter, for example, it was always referred to with cute nicknames.) That was the beauty of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues. She set out to make vagina have the same "value" as penis, and she succeeded, brilliantly.

We haven't managed to reclaim "cunt" yet, but we are sneaking up on it.

So. To maintain the word value balance, just as I have been doing since 1970, I shall edit rottenseed's mature and eloquent tone poem to:

tits cooters cocks balls

TL DR: tits cooters cocks balls



>> ^rottenseed:

tits cunts cocks balls