Yes, she's great at pointing that out.

What's the solution?

Quota's of protagonists sex? Replacing "damsel" with "prince" in distress? Getting rid of chainmail bikinis?

Oh, and how do we propagate that to the entire entertainment industry?

There is nothing wrong with playing a prince and rescuing a princess. There is nothing wrong with the princess being helpless. There is nothing wrong with Femmeshep kicking the shit out of the reapers and saving every being in the known universe, one of the most badass female protagonists around. More female protagonists = great, bring it on, but that's no reason to throw out a trope as old as time (incidentally, a trope enjoyed by a great many women who like to watch sappy romances where the charming fellow rescues the woman from her crappy life...).

Her series predicates on the concept that players are too fucking dumb to understand the difference between real life and the game. That if you play Duke Nukem, you'll walk around slapping girls tits and saying the most inappropriate things you can think of.

It's exactly the same tripe that Jack Thompson was peddling back in the day, games change how you think. And, for most people (ie. the mentally stable...), it was wrong then and it's wrong now. Your upbringing and parental guidance, and the relationship your male role models have with women, are far more likely to determine whether or not a man is likely to be sexist/misogynist than a few games with scantily clad girls needing a big strong man to save them... Society has changed to become more accepting of race, creed, sexual orientation and, of course, women, and it will continue to become so even if the old trope of the princess is in another castle hangs around. It may take generations before inequality dies out, if it ever does. It's not something you can fix by complaining about games.

You should read my complete post before posting reactionary statements. I never said current prison conditions are ideal. I said prison isn't working as a deterrent to criminals. As I said before, there are three potential ways of fixing that: make the punishment more severe, increase surveillance and enforcement or make prison safer and more comfortable in an attempt to rehabilitate criminals. The first two options are practically guaranteed to produce results. People litter, jaywalk, pirate and break traffic laws all the time because they know they can get away with it and even if they get caught, the punishment will be relatively minor. Conversely, it's much harder to get away with major crimes and the punishments are far more severe, which is why major crimes are committed far less often than minor ones. History has proven that fear is a very effective deterrent. Convince people that there are significant consequences for their actions and they'll think twice before doing something stupid.

Rehabilitation is less proven. If prison were comfortable, safe and enlightening, it could reduce crime rates as criminals are taught the error of their ways and spread their new-found wisdom amongst other potential criminals. Or it could increase crime rates as prisons become a refuge where the desperate get free food, shelter, healthcare and other conveniences.

The ideal solution would be to ensure that only qualified parents are allowed to reproduce. The majority of criminals are the result of poor upbringings, with negligent, ignorant and/or abusive parents unwilling or unable to train their children to become productive members of society. In an ideal world, there would actually be prerequisites to parenthood. Aspiring parents would need to meet certain criteria like minimum income, education and a clean record. If these requirements were somehow enforceable, crime rates would drop drastically.

Listened to this the other day.

Everyone pretty much ignored the philosopher because he had nothing substantive to say in a debate grounded in fact.

Traumatic brain injury can result in significant personality changes, and I recall reading on occasion that one of these can be a predisposition to religious belief (can't find a source right now).

I wonder if this is the case for the neurosurgeon here as nothing he says really explains why what he perceived wasn't simply imagined reality.

I thought the really straightforward and clear cut rebuttal here from the con side was that people's interpretations of the afterlife always seem to mirror what their religious upbringing would have assumed to be the case.

Also, that of course no revelatory information seeming to confirm the veracity of the experience (say the location of a valuable buried family heirloom) has ever been recorded to occur.

I'm afraid you can lump me in the same group. I don't understand why it is offensive to tell women to smile. I'm also in the same boat as others here in that i have literally never, in my existence, heard a male tell a woman to smile in any way that wasn't contextual. Thirdly, i'm struggling to imagine a way in which the directive to "Smile!" is offensive.

You say "stop making it about YOU!" yet you're speaking about a video that is trying to personalise an issue. I hate to even get involved in this argument, because i believe modern day feminism is more about finding an issue than it is about correcting any number of issues that really exist and need attention (ie. wage inequality).

I think you'd serve the cause a lot better if you tried to understand why people make those comments instead of chastising them for making it. You're missing an opportunity to explain the problem better - you've engaged people, people are interested and talking about it. Now is the time to explain it so that those who don't understand can understand. And if you can present it in a believable way, you will convince me.

However if you stand there, fold your arms and say "ugh, guys!" then i'm going to insist that you're behaving in a sexist way.

In my upbringing, i was subject to women abusing their advantageous legal position when it comes to custody of children and such (i was the child). I was witness to women who claimed abuse when there was no abuse, and thankfully only saw a very small effect of what can happen when such false accusations are made. I've seen a close male relative go through divorces in which he made his best attempt to share the assets of the divorce, whilst the female partner did what they could to claw as much profit as possible, eventually taking a completely unfair share (all of it) in one case.

However, i am rational enough to understand that not all people are like that, and that my experiences are not common. If i was given the opportunity to campaign about father's rights, i'd do it clearly and in a way that people could empathise and sympathise with. I wouldn't generalise and i certainly wouldn't tell them not to personalise, because empathy is all about being able to personalise an issue.

If men are arguing with the point, perhaps the point is not being explained well enough. And if it keeps happening, perhaps that's an even stronger message. I wouldn't argue with videos that campaign against domestic violence - which i also haven't seen happen! - and that's because the campaign is well presented so that i am able to grasp the problem.

I don't understand why what this video refers to is a female issue. Add to that the fact that i have never seen it happen with such frequency that it was notably a female-only issue.

Until i am able to understand why this is specifically a female issue, i'm afraid i will consider this video to be sexist in that it addresses a universal issue as a solely female problem.

What's your favorite ice cream flavor? How about your favorite color? Did you choose those things to be your favorite? Could you suddenly decide--right this instant--that a different flavor of ice cream or color is your favorite and not only behave as if it was, but actually believe it was (i.e. eat the ice cream every day and not be secretly wishing it was a different flavor)?

I suspect you've exaggerated how much choice comes into play in determining these things. Genetics, early life experiences, upbringing, social ties, and a host of other factors are probably far more important than choice in determining our "personal preferences."

Unless you're trying to say we can deny our personal preferences, which is absolutely true. People who are smart can decide fitting in is more important than being themselves and pretend to be dumb in order to be socially accepted. That behavior is a choice, but I don't think it really changes their underlying preferences.

As for the second part, it sounds to me like you agree with exactly what he said. "It's not you, it's the bully." Disagreeing with that statement would mean it IS you that's the problem and you deserve to be bullied. Whether the bully is an "evil little fuck" or the product of their environment, it's the bully that's the problem, no?

Haven't read the books, only seen a couple of the movies and I doubt I've even seen them in order. Have no idea who Cho Chang might be, etc.

But it's pretty rare to find an author/writer who can portray a character in a non-stereotypical believable manner when it's a nationality, culture, gender, etc different than theirs.

You'll notice a lot of American characters are based on the "cowboy" attitude when it's set elsewhere in the world. Doctor Who has a bit of this at times.

And male writers who do female characters in books, I often find they spend a lot of time thinking about the lead male character, love, hate, etc. If the lead is a "bad guy" the female is usually very subservient, and if the lead is a "nice guy" the female is "an equal" which they go to great lengths to make clear.

Female writers who do male character perspectives spend a lot of time either belittling the lead female character, being a potential love interest, or are "nice guys" who the female lead has no interest in but they obviously keep trying.

They main character tends to be a similar nationality and race as the author...or values similar to what would be standard for their upbringing. And they often pick hair colors they have.......and similar backgrounds to theirs if it's a more modern book. Lawyer, doctor, martial arts, military, areas they grew up in and or live in, etc.

I mean at this point, I find it funny that as soon as XYZ nationality or "age group" person dies in The Walking Dead they find a replacement usually before 2-3 episodes pass. Killed off annoying old dude who had two "daughter like figures", find a new annoying old dude who has two daughters...situation.

So.... given Rowling's popularity....she's probably doing a bit more than the common author/writers are to keep people interested...because the stuff I wrote above is like 75% of the authors. I'm sure a lot of Chinese writers aren't producing a lot of white guy main character books.....probably should make that black guy instead because they can get offended.

If there is a God, a truly benevolent God who has given us free will to do with as we wish and would never interfere, then that universe is identical to one where he does not exist.

What I find most surprising here isn't that they have their faith in the face of reality, but rather that they put their beliefs into the science they seem to know so little about. 'Does that mean god is an animal?' is a great example. No.. the entire idea is moot because god does not exist in the first place. 'God hasn't been heard of since the big bang in science' is another.. no god isn't in the equation in the first place.

It's a clear, fundamental misunderstanding of what science is, stemming clearly from an upbringing that ignored anything science related. I wouldn't doubt that many of these people went to schools were biology either isn't taught or is dramatically down played.

I don't have a lot of time at the moment to get into this in depth, but this article might help to clarify my thoughts on the issue.

This is not a "competition," by any means, but I am sensitized to the issue, having been indoctrinated throughout my schooling and my upbringing by what feels like a social inequity which purports that, implicitly, men are "bad" and need to be "checked" at every turn, while women are "good," and must be protected and acquiesced at all times. As I get older, however, this attitude turns sour as I continuously find myself faced with a stark dichotomy between either heeding the social, professional, and political needs, wants, and desires of "all women," and those of protecting my own social, professional, and political needs, wants, and desires "as a man." These shouldn't be dichotomous, but for some reason, it has become such.

I am willing to look at and manage my own triggers and/or issues around this, as a personal effort (and I do on almost a daily basis), but in the meantime (and in the hopes of supporting such an effort), I feel there needs to be a lot more recognition and dialogue around what constitutes "equality" (be it gender, or financial, or otherwise) within a society that is either politically regulated and thereby "rigged," by definition on behalf of some people, at the expense of others; or it is socially imposed, whereby (for example) a man is simply expected to be the breadwinner, by virtue of his gender, and reactively judged if he is or can not be that.

I have no interest in "making a video" about this, since my energies are better placed elsewhere, at present, but I can and do make comments on videos like this one, in an effort to meet and respond to the messages with which we're inculcated, with the personal albeit opposing view that things "are as they are" for a reason, and if we're to do anything about it, it requires a fuller examination of the entire picture, and not simply a one-sided, biased and therefore "unequal," perspective which posts blame (and/or guilt) upon one side of the equation without any (or with little) insight as to what role one plays in the issue, oneself.

I am not saying that the inequities aren't there. In fact, I'd go so far as to say
that people need to come to terms with the fact that some people will always "have more" than others and, in a leveled playing field, that is the only fair situation that can exist. In other words, any forced or imposed "equality" is implicitly incompatible with both liberty and freedom, and can not (and should not) be abided as a matter of course.

I encourage you to take a look at the article posted at the top of this comment for another perspective on the same (or "similar") issue.

This is pretty funny for a lot of reasons, the biggest being all the people involved are so obviously not cat owners nor have they even bothered to understand cat behaviour.

First of all, the snarky comments at the end of the video, actually, it's not about wanting to believe my cat needs me, I'm very well aware it doesn't need me, that has no correlation to loving me. I appreciate that's just the person writing this script but it puts an underlining tone that cat owners are delusional and sets people up to believe the experiment was a "success", even with the little bite about it not being conclusive.

Not all cats are the same, the beauty of them is precisely their individuality! Breed also plays a very large factor and so does upbringing, not to mention social behaviour of the animal in question. Let's ignore that cats are evolutionarily independent and dogs/babies are not.

Why would a cat care if its owner left momentarily? It is not built to care about such a frivolous event, it takes notes of it (which btw, no other animal was capable of and the narrator incorrectly says the cat is distracted while it distinctly watching the owner leave) and carries on, the situation pans out.

Likewise when the owner comes back, the cat again takes note of this and because it was rather brief, it resumes carrying on its business. This wasn't some "OH MY GOD WHAT DO I DO WITH MY LIFE!??!?!" drastic event. Quite frankly, the cat has the most intelligent behaviour.

The reason it check outs the stranger is because it's an *unknown*, cats don't immediately trust *anything* until they've inspected it. If they had replaced that stranger with a paper bag, the reaction would have been the same. It's not that it is ignoring its owner, it's that it knows its owner is safe. It is inspecting a potential threat.

Cats are simply not basic enough to compare in this experiment and their evolutionary traits are directly opposed to these rather bias tests of affection.

Pretension ain't genius and Gaga's output rates mediocre at best.
Again, Trey Parker's voice adjusted to Cartman frequency produces a more pleasing rendition of "Poker Face" than the original artist formerly known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, who as far as I can tell is a little full-of-herself, Sicilian/Canadian narcissist whose upper west side Manhattan upbringing has spilled-over into her horrible taste and run-of-the-mill musical offerings.

Her wiki page touts her many self-labeled endeavors, all of which appeal to her sense of self as the center of the universe.

She's a hag.

I agree with the concept here, but I think he is overstating it a bit. Actively selling out your own people/family while slavery was actively occurring is rather worse than forgetting (or never learning) that your religion was used as a tenuous justification for slavery many many generations ago.

On the other hand, a more contemporary spinoff of this that lends further weight to the argument can be found in the widespread apprehension amongst whites back in the 60's and 70's that all or most of the African American population would convert to Islam. A lot of writings by prominent white people of that era show just how terrifying that prospect was for them, and many candidly justified that fear by saying that it would reduce or eliminate the level of control that whites had over the black population. Pretty disgusting stuff to read from a modern point of view.

Actually, I'm fairly surprised that wave petered out as quickly as it did. Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and others brought the trend of blacks converting to Islam into national attention; but it didn't gain as much traction as many whites of the time feared. It would be interesting to see a study into the whys of that -- my best (yet unfortunately rather stereotype-based) guess is that many single-parent or head-of-household African American mothers were reluctant to let their sons convert from their family's traditional Christian upbringing and suppressed or quashed a lot of the momentum of the movement in its early stages.

Oh yeah, and Oregon. Lived in Portland before the mainstream Hipster-hijack, back when pretentious hippy-douchebag was in the incubation stages (1991-2).

Yeah, a lotta good sushi to be had there and the primary reason?? Pretentious kids from all over the country flocked to the land of no sunshine to escape the repression of their upbringing brokered by their disillusioned hippie parents who drank the Babylonian Kool-Aid at University (incubator for ineffectual putties), to bask in the aroma of their own farts.

You'd fit right in there gwiz

My mother is a biology teacher and all my life she's shown me how fascinating the natural world is. It's become a real interest for me and shapes the way I live my life. When I got married my wife and I went to kenya on safari and saw some of the most beautiful and incredible wildlife. I remembered seeing lions and elephants in the zoo with my mother telling me all about them, to see them for real in the wild was mind blowing. I vividly remember how much my mother would love to see Africa. She could make the creepy crawlies under a rotting log fascinating, I just thought how wonderful lions, leopards and so on would be for her.

She's worked hard all her life and provided very well for my brother and I, we had a great upbringing and great opportunities but they never left enough for themselves. So last year my wife and I took her to Zambia. Highlight of the trip was tracking a lioness on foot and getting to within about fifty yards of it. Being able to share the experience with her was awesome. We're lucky enough to be able to afford it and it's the best money I've ever, ever spent.

If you can, you really should spoil your mother. They deserve it

I wouldn't say anything, I don't think that it would be particularly effective. We all have our own idea of what morality is, and Stalin's is a very complex result of innumerable factors like upbringing, disposition and circumstance, and it would be a bit self important of me to think that I could argue that out of him. He lived, acted, died and left his mark on history. The paremeters set forth by the physical world and the collective actions of everyone else who has lived either as a contemporary or since has judged which of those actions have value and will live on. It's a messy process, certainly, but it's just how things work.

In other words, you don't have any argument as to why Stalin should adopt your morality and abandon his own. If you do I invite you to post it here. How can you escape Ravi's charge that atheism is incoherent in the absence of any such argument?

Thankfully, we seem to be heading in a direction that diverges considerably from that Stalin would espouse. I think that a certain evolutionary tendency towards beneficial collectivism is responsible for that.

Mind you that I'm not arguing for a one world government here, but rather I think that a sense of connection and personal responsibility for the wellbeing of everything else on this planet, ecosystem and all, will bode well for how I and my descendants experience this thing we call life.

It's only one of many competing survival strategies, and nothing more.

So if Hitler had won and the world was in the grips of his totalitarian regime, this would just a particular evolutionary tendency playing out? What makes one better than the other?

"Do you believe that there has ever been a case where slavery has been justified, and do you believe that there has ever been a good reason for anyone to butcher a toddler with a sword?"

Why is it wrong to do either of those things?

Wrong, my question is in no way off topic and implying otherwise may be easier for you, but it won't do much to convince anyone. We are discussing the incoherence of atheism relative to the superior coherence of Christianity as it pertains to systems of morality. Therefore any question regarding the efficacy of a Judeo-Christian theistic moral compass is entirely relevant.

So my question remains, but I'll answer yours because it too is relevant:

I wouldn't say anything, I don't think that it would be particularly effective. We all have our own idea of what morality is, and Stalin's is a very complex result of innumerable factors like upbringing, disposition and circumstance, and it would be a bit self important of me to think that I could argue that out of him. He lived, acted, died and left his mark on history. The paremeters set forth by the physical world and the collective actions of everyone else who has lived either as a contemporary or since has judged which of those actions have value and will live on. It's a messy process, certainly, but it's just how things work.

Thankfully, we seem to be heading in a direction that diverges considerably from that Stalin would espouse. I think that a certain evolutionary tendency towards beneficial collectivism is responsible for that.

Mind you that I'm not arguing for a one world government here, but rather I think that a sense of connection and personal responsibility for the wellbeing of everything else on this planet, ecosystem and all, will bode well for how I and my descendants experience this thing we call life.

It's only one of many competing survival strategies, and nothing more.

I'm still waiting for you to answer my question