Your video, David Mitchell's Soapbox: LOL, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

My favorite smiley usage is for exaggerating craziness, ie:

"If I ever see your pimply face again, I'll smash it with a brick, have a nice day asshole "

>> ^MaxWilder:

I disagree with his definition of the smiley face. It means that the previous statement was lighthearted. That's different from "I didn't mean it." Though it could mean you were only kidding, it could also mean "I don't mean that as an insult."

>> ^solecist:

"haha" works, and i use lol sarcastically all the time!


I bet you use it sarcastically in speech. Use it in online chat and your sarcasm will be hard to detect.

Your video, Phone Calls | David Mitchell's Soapbox, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^Truckchase:

Screw voicemails. Visual voicemails are decent, but the standard "enter your pin... you have xx messages... press this key to .... message left at.... zzzzzz... oh are you still here?"
So yeah, I don't check messages.


Me neither, River City Ransom. I just saw you called, and I call you back. Don't bother leaving a message. It's a waste of time for the both of us...well actually just for you since I won't be checking it. The problem with a voicemail is that its either something you can quickly say in a text, or its something that needs to be discussed. In either case, the voicemail is not the most effective way of communicating.

Awesome.
I was in a Soap box derby when I was a kid. (age 10 or 11)
I didn't have a dad around so I built it myself - Ugliest thing ever, Painted with dark brown house paint and had rope steering - we called it "The Walk-Away". Came in second-place over all and got myself a big trophy and my photo in the paper. Good Times.

Never even conceived of making it look as cool as this one at the time. You don't need to win when you're driving an x-wing - he already won before he started the race!

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
http://www.instructables.com/id/X-Wing-Fighter-Soapbox-Derby-Car/

Socratic dialogue:

Blanfisticles: People donate more to causes that are threatened, therefore we must eliminate all funding for causes in order to increase their revenues!

Dystopianysus: Uhh, dude, you're nuts, tax cuts don't increase revenues cutting government funding to a program won't increase its revenue.

Blankfisticles: Whose responsibility is it to give to charitable causes, government, or people?

Dystopianysus: You're changing the subject.

Blankfisticles: So?

Dystopianysus: *sigh* Very well. I say it's everyone's responsibility to look out for other people, and that's why I don't see why setting up a society-wide arrangement like government funding for charitable programs bothers you.

Blankfist: You're an idiot. And a statist. And Thoreau was an anarchist, and as we all know he's an infallible person who you're a moron for not listening to. And no, I don't plan on living in a shack in the middle of nowhere, are you crazy too?

Blankfisticles: Shut up, id. What I mean to say is that helping people should come from the free and voluntary choices of individuals. No one should be forced to do anything not of their choosing.

Dystopianysus: And what if an insufficient number of people donate to charity, and it results in mass suffering? What then?

Blankfist: That won't happen.

Blankfisticles: I said SHUT UP, id. Excuse me, I mean to say that I would give all I had, and get on a soapbox to shout and yell to encourage others to give all they could to help the massive suffering, but I would never once put the threat of force on anyone.

Dystopianysus: But isn't it the duty of all people to help those in need?

Blankfisticles: Yes, but they shouldn't be forced to live up to that duty.

Dystopianysus: How is that a duty then? It's not a duty if you can choose not to live up to it without any consequences.

Blankfist: Still, you just shouldn't. Because.

Blankfisticles: People own themselves, and also own their lives, therefore people own the product of the labor they spend time on, and it should never be taken away from them just like your arm shouldn't be taken away from them. To say otherwise is to say that you can enslave another man, and you disagree with slavery don't you?

Dystopianysus: So what you're saying is that while you say it's our moral duty as individuals to help those in need, you're going to refuse to voluntarily agree to a social contract that formalizes that duty into a legal requirement to contribute money to charitable causes?

Blankfisticles: Pretty much.

NetRunner von Freud: Blankfisticles, have you ever considered the possibility that your affinity for these anti-tax philosophies is being driven by your more basic impulses, and that you just use them as post-hoc justifications for things you wanted to do anyways?

Blankfist: *gay

NetRunner von Freud: Sigh.

Okay, this has gotten pathetic.

Some of you are hopping on your soapbox and declaring women to be mindless nimrods who've fallen victim to some insidious plot by evil male dominated advertising agencies. Women aren't idiots. They're not infants. They're capable of the critical perspectives any human is capable of, and that includes syphoning out the bullshit in shitty retouched ads.

Advertisers create specific visions of what they (or the creative directors) think are beautiful, whether that's anorexic girls, beefcake men, gender-neutral models or fucking Lara Croft/Sucker Punch badasses. You're all persecuting the advertisers because they're not putting fat and unattractive people in ads. But who wants to see that?

This has nothing to do with equality or feminism. This is just fear politicking motivated by some woman's perverted sense of feminism. I accept women as my complete equal in every regard, and I love my fiancée and think she's the most beautiful woman I will ever know and every word from her mouth is a blissful miracle to my ears, but don't think for a second I don't check out other women who are thin, young and attractive. And that ain't because some douchebag at the advertising agency told me that's what I should I like. No. That's because I'm an instinctual animal behind these opposable thumbs and cognitive thought, and my brain tells my dick what I like and it ain't gelatinous thighs and muffin shaped asses.

Spoco2 isn't talking about how the kid shouldn't have defended himself, he's talking about how such a horrible situation should never have happened. His apparent resolution is to punish all individuals that contributed to the situation.

But, let's say that you're a kid in school who realizes that the social atmosphere is completely horrible. What do you do? Do you stand on a soapbox and make a momentus Martin-Luther-King-like speech to get everyone to stop treating each other like shit, and to care about each other instead? Outside the box looking in, perhaps you can do something. The teacher who made a long comment on here has obviously figured out very clever ways of doing it by manually adjusting the social environment...at least in their own classroom. But, if you're one of the people stuck inside the problem trying to deal with it, the situation is exponentially more difficult.

In short, it's going to take much more than 'punishing all those involved' to correct the atmosphere; every kid in the school would need to be punished. For any school fight, you still see people forming a circle around the two people watching and commenting. Such is the default nature of things for humans. Back in elementary/middle school, I was pretty low on the totem pole, but I also am guilty of treating other people like shit (those lower than myself), and relishing violence whenever I saw it. If you're going to override the default, it's going to take major torrents of social reprogramming.

What? I can barely hear you from atop that tower of a soapbox you're standing on.

That was visionary.

We are now at one of those "precipice" moments, when the world has become something that it wasn't before, yet we keep using the old model.

I swiped some guy's Denver Post last week. It was sitting there for a few days so I didn't think he would mind.

Anyway...I opened the "Help Wanted" section. The entire section was about a 5x5 inch square, for all of Denver.

Back in the early 90's, there were always two or three full, broadsheet pages of want ads.

But no more. Why? Craigslist.

Back in 1990, nobody could have conceived of Craigslist, other than Mr. Clark here.

And I think that new dimension of "networking" for lack of a better word has yet to be utilized to its full extent.

I think that, more than ever before, we are in a postion where the common person can collaborate with people on the otherside of the world, in a very meaningful way.

(stepping off soapbox now)

>> ^oohlalasassoon:

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^oohlalasassoon:
David Mitchell is so much better in character, though he's pretty good as himself too.

I don't think he likes himself all that much though.

Hard to say, but his out-of-character (if you can call it that) schtick seems to essentially boil down to him bitching about something. It's funny sometimes but if I were him and I was concerned about my legacy I'd do more well-written sketches like this and less soapbox stuff.


I think the guy can do it all. The soapbox thing is just a small part of who he is and what he does. Essentially yes, he is leans towards the ranty style comedian, but when you see him on panel shows and how he interacts with other people, he's certainly not always the miserable bastard he shows on the soapbox clips. The same when he's presenting, or being interviewed on his own.

As well as co-writing some absolutely amazing pieces of comedy, I don't think many of us would deny here. And then acting in them, in a pretty diverse set of roles. Plus Peep Show is one of the best things ever made

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^oohlalasassoon:
David Mitchell is so much better in character, though he's pretty good as himself too.

I don't think he likes himself all that much though.


Hard to say, but his out-of-character (if you can call it that) schtick seems to essentially boil down to him bitching about something. It's funny sometimes but if I were him and I was concerned about my legacy I'd do more well-written sketches like this and less soapbox stuff.

Damn, people. Everyone should know by now that you don't argue with the people enforcing laws, you argue with judges and lawmakers. Cops can't change policy, generally don't give a shit, and just want to do their job and go home. Once you reach a certain level of belligerence, they're going to arrest you if - for nothing else - just to cover their ass.

You're a border patrol officer. A belligerent, nervous guy crosses border. You know he's probably harmless, but he is putting up a lot of fuss. You let him through. He gets arrested stateside - guess who loses his job? Also, what kind of message does that send to people who are here for nefarious purposes - raise a fuss, and we'll let you through.

So you arrest him and let the judge sort it out.

Dude should have come down off his soapbox after the second time through the speech. He could have answered six questions and been on his way.

@kymbos totally. I read through the whole thing as if it was "David Mitchell's Soapbox".