Ack, I want to hear more! One of those videos that you look at and go, cool it's an entire 5 minutes of Trekkie AND civil rights goodness -- then it's over in a blink. Should have been 15 minutes. Damn.

We really need to hear more about Tack-eh's "liberal" conversations with Roddenberry... My wife is a TNG fanatic (and Asian), so this might be the selling point I've been looking for to get her to watch the OG with me, which she doesn't consider serious enough scifi.

Also, on the subject of the "South" -- my family is from Florida/SC and I remember my mom freaking out because she worked in a building (circa 1988) with a colored's only bathroom. She had no idea that there were still relics of segregation in public places. I don't know how it survived THAT long, but when you live an hour away from the nearest grocery store, yet the manatee "preserve" (they didn't look very preserved, the majority of them covered from head to tail in propeller scars...) is less than five minutes away, you're bound to find things that escaped the flow of time. Trailers on blocks of cement, just resting on top of the white sand in a hurricane fuckland... How smart my ancestors were.

Poe's law is an internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extremism are indistinguishable from sincere expressions of extremism.

Poe's Law implies that parody will often be mistaken for sincere belief, and.. sincere beliefs for parody.

You're a parody of yourself.. Bob-ception.

Firstly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_police_brutality_in_the_United_States

Would you like to also explain how Racism is a modern liberal invention that didn't "truly" exist before 1950.

Second - LMAO. Really.. blame the media for YOUR racism?

You and Lantern are the ones portraying blacks as lazy stupid thugs & savages.

You can deny that.. But all your comments are archived so..

Yeah, the only reason FoxNews does it is because YOU watch it.

Lastly -

When all the dimwitted unapologetic willfully ignorant old racist folks like you finally kick the bucket.. then we can move on.

Your ignorance and denialism of White Privilege & White Fragility aka Aggrieved White Man Syndrome is the problem.

As soon as there's a generation where the majority of white people go..

"Wow, yeah.. our ancestors totally fucked everyone else over and we still directly benefit from that.. sorry guys.

We're gonna make up for that."

THEN we can finally move on.

That should probably only take another.. 300 - 500 years.

I'll quote you again for emphasis:
'Fuck the Irish and Jews, they don't get murdered at rate of 1 every 28 hours.'

Dude, fuck you for that statement. I'm german, most of my life I've been told to feel sorry for the fucking holocaust. It ain't my fault.
I take issue with parts of the jewish community that keeps complaining about their history and ignoring all the other, smaller holocausts, the ethnic cleansings and whatever else you want to call the genocides happening after WW2 but I will not accept you taking a dump on it.
You have it bad, no doubt, and black people in the US always had to endure unimaginable suffering. I have absolutely no clue how horrible the shit you and your ancestors had to go through is.
But...
My great-grandfather and his peers build fucking corpse factories. My ancestors shipped people in train cars to a place to literally destroy them, to murder them. They called it 'Endloesung'.
My ancestors industrialised genocide. The Shoah claimed at least 6 million lives.
As justified your rage and your hurt is, as much unimaginable suffering your ancestors and those like them had to endure, you don't get to tell those that survived and their families it to fuck themselves.
I wouldn't dare to do that to you or your ancestors.

There's a lot of terrible shit going on around the world and it's part of why I'm not fond of my own species. We both wish the world would be different and I like to think I understand, or at least have a vague idea, why you're so angry. But how could I? I never suffered that awful shit. I'm sorry but that's just what I was born into. Nobody ever asked me what I thought about it.
However, maybe I'm wrong but telling a group like the jews, a group of people whose history of being treated horribly as long or even longer than your own people, to go fuck themselves...
you're just loosing me here. I have no other choice than calling you out on that. You're dead wrong on that. How can you do that? Don't you have any decency, haven't you seen the mountain of corpses?

They murdered them. All of them. Blacks and jews. It doesn't matter. They're all lost. We lost them.

Would it be really sad if i admitted that it was lovely to see Dogmeat's ancestor be so prominent? I still remember the original Dogmeat in Fallout 1 in Junktown and his descendant in an encounter in 2. I bloody loved that little fictional dog. If he died, i was loading a save game.... after blowing the head off anyone who touched him.

I guess i've got the Mad Max reboot to thank for that, because the original Dogmeat was a reference to Max's dog of the same name.

This kind of attitude is depressing. It's none of your business what someone does in their spare time when no one else is affected by it. There are functioning alcoholics turning up for work pissed, flying planes, driving buses, teaching children. But no, let's go after the guy who sits in his bedroom playing music with a joint. Let's prevent him from having a life, even if he is self medicating a mental illness. It serves him right - if he's got an illness, he shouldn't be using naturally occurring medicine like our ancestors have for thousands upon thousands of years, no! He should be paying hundreds of pounds to a big pharma company for a pill that they invented a few years ago.

The premise behind drugs testing people is based on many things i disagree with:
1) the spectacular failure of the war of drugs - not only has drug use increased in the timeframe, but it has ruined probably millions of lives, needlessly turning ordinary, hard working people into criminals for no good reason other than "we like this plant, but we don't like this plant, and now neither may you"
2) the origin of the war on drugs - which iirc from a well sourced and produced video on here recently was instigated by a vindictive racist who wanted to go criminalise things that were seen as "black people" pastimes
3) the bias of the war on drugs - where drugs associated with the poor and underprivileged are relentlessly pursued to the detriment of functioning happy families across the world, but drugs associated with rich white folk such as those boardroom jockeys who snort coke in the office bathroom, nah, give them an easy time
4) the american prison business - which demands a steady supply of low cost, low maintenance, low rights workers who have no choice in the matter
5) the spreading of disinformation through formal education/popular media, and lack of actual knowledge or experience of drugs - which has led to a generation of people who now firmly believe that the moment you inhale a particle of THC (or "inject 1 marijuana" to the uninitiated), your brain turns into a fried egg, and you immediately begin stealing, cheating, and peddling dangerous items to children

Some of the brightest and best humans were influenced and inspired by drugs. If i wrote a list of people that i had the greatest respect for and who i considered to have made a positive influence on the world, half of them would almost certainly be drugs users; and i mean scientists, writers and artists. Your philosophy is a detriment to society, but thankfully as the decades pass, there are less and less with that philosophy. I loathe being blunt, but there is nothing worse than someone who feels the need to dictate to others what they should and shouldn't do on the basis of what they personally do or don't approve of.

We might get about 90 years on this planet with a bit of luck - why the hell do the minority spend so much time trying to dictate to the majority what they do with that time? And why do the majority let them? What sort of control fetish is it that inclines people to want to do that?

This guy's life has been fucking ruined by your adopted philosophy towards drugs, and you offer to help him as long as he bends to your will? How magnanimous of you to stoop to gutter level to help a mere drug-addled cretin... I think he'd tell you to stick your job, he's overqualified to work under you.

Now we're arguing semantics. Yummy.

racism:"noun
1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement"
See, the keyword here is achievement. There are no achievements without any form of judgement. Think of it in the most simple terms, X Box or Steam achievements. Let's say you play Call Of Duty 18 and get the "Used a gun!" achievement for firing the very first shot in the game. You got this because the game's code made a judgement. Did the player fire a shot? Yes or no. Sure, it's easy to judge that, the facts are very clear and easy to read. Are you worthy of this achievement? Are you as much worth as I am, the guy who finished the game and got the achievement?
And what about the guy who never got that achievement because he played the entire game only using a knife? Think about it, playing any Call Of Duty single player campaign using only melee weapons and throwing knives. Who's worthy know? Who achieved more?
Achievement depends entirely on the definition and who's making them. The knife guy played the way harder game and got no recognition but the guy who got the "Used A Gun!" and the "1000 Headshots!" achievement is the one bragging online about his achievements and medals next to his name.
Who has achieved more, the ethnic group that developed many different technologies (like, say, guns) or the ethnic group that still runs naked through the jungle and considers knives high-tech? "Those naked dudes are clearly stupid and less developed than I am because I got guns!" said the white man in Africa.
One of the biggest racist prejudices black americans hear is that they are lazy because they achieve so much less than white folk. They guys with the titles and medals and guns.
Achievements are the acknowledgements that you gained skills, positions, posessions, knowledge or reputation. That can only be acknowledged becaused somebody judged you. Like the test or dissertation I have to write to become a Professor of Physics. This achievement will cause other to have prejudices about me, like "He's a professor, he must be smart!"
The definition of racism you posted says this:
"racism is the belief that depending on your race you can develop in a certain way or to a certain level"
This is a modern definition based on racist expirience. It says that racists think you can not achieve more than they can based on the achievements your ancestors had compared to theirs. "Once a slave, always a slave. If black people weren't so lazy, they wouldn't need a good whipping!" That train of thought.
All that of course underplays the emotional component of hatred, the driving force of racism in its worst forms.
Now my fingers hurt.

Let's extend it past white people. Almost* everyone in the world has got where they by an accident of birth.

I have a good job and I earn a decent living. I worked hard to get where I am and I continue to work hard to provide value to my boss so he pays me well. But I didn't get here entirely on my own.

First, I was lucky enough to be born in a first world country. Second, I have a reasonable aptitude for math and science and logic/programming comes easily to me.
Third, my parents both had good jobs (partially a product of their own births) and they cared about my education and gave me the opportunities to study.

And yeah, I'm white, English speaking, heterosexual and even more fortunately, male .

All of which gave me a frankly insurmountable head start over someone born in a 3rd world country whose family are scrapping by. Even if I had the same skills and work ethic, it's highly likely that I wouldn't have been able to have the quality of life I have now.

So yeah, I didn't own any slaves and neither did my ancestors. Hell, my country was oppressed for centuries. But that doesn't mean I still didn't come into this world with a massive privilege and it would be the height of hubris not to acknowledge that.

* obviously there are people who have pulled themselves out of extreme adverstiy despite everything against them. I'm not talking about those people.

Maybe. I feel like they all come from a proto vsauce dude, a lost ancestor of the youtube personalities.

The vsauce dude had this assistant vsauce guy who was a direct clone of himself. It was scary. I don't feel that same urgent awareness of fear in this video, so while the pattern is close enough to detect, it's different enough to keep me at ease. Seeing someone actually pattern themselves directly after someone is CREEPY.

No, you misguided fools, Thursdays is beer pong, whilst Wednesday is for flip cup and hooking up with other followers of Thor. As long as you honour your ancestors, we don't care who you hook up with. Heck, if you wanna marry a shoe, we'll marry you.

The weekend is the holiest of holy days, as we observe the sacred rituals of watching sporting events, and playing video games. I'm just saying, we have a pretty great church here. As long as you pitch in for buying kegs and food, and make sure everyone passes out on your lawn, or takes a taxi cab home, the Church of Thor will welcome all!

I'm just saying, as far as religion go, I'm starting up the Church of Thor. Everyone is welcome, as long as you honour your ancestors and help chip in for Tuesday's Wing Night.

PS. Tuesdays are Wing Night, BYOB. =)

When you make ridiculous claims like "he was just being a good guy cop trying to help", I see nothing wrong or argumentative in pointing out where you made your mistake in logic thinking that might be the case.

"Huge dissertations of bullshit arguing into thin air."
Well! If that's not the pot calling the kettle black! LOL!!!!

You must have replied without reading the entire post. I thought my last paragraph illustrated clearly why THIS cop was not 'being a good guy helping' as you wish to think. That does not mean it doesn't happen, or even that it's not the norm, it means it wasn't happening this time. I'm sorry if that's a difficult concept for me to properly illustrate.

It is a cop's job to find crime. They often find it where none exists. In order to protect yourself AND honor your ancestor's sacrifices, intelligent and patriotic people exorcize their rights and remain silent. Every time. My grandfather, the successful lawyer, taught me that. It's not paranoid any more than wearing your seat belt is paranoid.


Bad day?

Not answering questions is not being confrontational or an asshole when the questioner's only motivation is to find a 'problem' he can 'solve' by charging you with a crime. My sense of self preservation demands that I have a lawyer present during any questioning, and that I have written immunity before giving any answers. It's not being rude, it's being safe, EDIT: and it's honoring the enormous sacrifices made by my and other's ancestors in order to create and preserve the right to remain silent, ignoring/foregoing that or any other hard won right is a slap in their faces IMO.

Interactions with the police and normal person to person interactions are governed by a different set of rules.

Once the cop could see that there was absolutely no issue, why did he continue with the stop and demand ID and insurance if he was being a 'good guy cop, just trying to help'? That action denies the 'good guy' premise.

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

Homology is a complex subject..it would take awhile to get into. I found a good link that illustrates the argument against it being a proof that macroevolution occured. If you want to take a look we could discuss further:

http://creation.com/does-homology-provide-evidence-of-evolutionary-naturalism

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

I guess it depends on who you ask?

Erwin, D.H. (2000) Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution. Evol. & Devel. 2:78-84.

the independence of macroevolution is affirmed not only by species selection but also by other processes such as effect sorting among species.

Lieberman, B.S. and Vrba, E.S. (2005) Gould on species selection. in MACROEVOLUTION: Diversity, Disparity, Contingency. E.S. Vrba and N. Eldredge eds. supplement to Paleobiology vol. 31(2) The Paleontological Society, Lawrence, Kansas, USA

Micro- and macroevolution are thus different levels of analysis of the same phenomenon: evolution. Macroevolution cannot solely be reduced to microevolution because it encompasses so many other phenomena: adaptive radiation, for example, cannot be reduced only to natural selection, though natural selection helps bring it about.

Scott, E.C. (2004) Evolution vs. creationism: an introduction. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press).

Macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution, and we must envision the process governing its course as being analogous to natural selection but operating at a higher level of organization.

Stanley, S. M. (1975) A theory of evolution above the species level. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 72: 646-650.

In conclusion, then, macroevolutionary processes are underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with microevolutionary theories, but macroevolutionary studies require the formulation of autonomous hypotheses and models (which must be tested using macroevolutionary evidence). In this (epistemologically) very important sense, macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution: macroevolution is an autonomous field of evolutionary study.

Ayala, F.J. (1983) Beyond Darwinism? The Challenge of Macroevolution to the Synthetic Theory of Evolution. reprinted in PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, M. Ruse ed. p. 118-133.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: "It happened." Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd. -(Simon Conway Morris, [palaeontologist, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK], "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold," Cell, Vol. 100, pp.1-11, January 7, 2000, p.11)

I'm late back to this party and iI don't have time to properly address all the points you make so I'll just stick to this one.

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

There really is a lot of very good peer reviewed scientific evidence.

Darwin may well have taken a leap of faith but it is one which has now been backed up with a huge amount of evidence. Evolution is not open for questioning any more than gravity is. It's a very simple process which can even be seen happening around us.

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

That said mutations can be big as well as small. We've all seen photos of two headed snakes for example. That happens to be a detrimental change, but if a large change occurred that happened to be beneficial and the individual survived to breed then a large change could occur very quickly. Remember these are chance occurrences, there's no intelligence driving evolution, it's just a simple process of random mutation and natural selection.

If you accept that genes can mutate randomly (something which is known to be fact and can be shown happening) and that natural selection occurs (again something which can be shown happening) then there really isn't anything more to be said. Those two processes, given a lot of time can change an animal or plant dramatically. And time is something life has had a lot of. Even the cambrian explosion you mentioned happened over 20 million years or so.

This is evolution. There's nothing complex about the process, there really isn't. There's no way that mutations and natural selection can fit together in any way that isn't evolution.

Hey robbersdog49, thanks for the level headed reply. I'll address your comments in a few pieces here:

The origin of life and Darwinian evolution are two entirely different things. Regardless of how you believe the first life came about we do know from the fossil record and evidence about the way the environment and climate changed on earth in those early millennia that the first life was simple single cell organisms.

In my study of the evidence from the fossil record, I found more evidence that contradicted the assertions of Darwinian evolution than confirmed it. The Cambrian explosion for example, where basically every type of animal body plan comes into existence at around the same time, contradicts the idea that these things happened gradually over long periods of time. In fact, a new theory was invented called "punctuated equilibrium" which says that the reason we aren't finding the transitional fossils is that the changes happen too quickly to be found in the fossil record. Instead of a theory based on the evidence, we have a theory to explain away the lack of evidence.

Evolution is the process which turned these very simple life forms into the complex forms you see all around you today. It's an ongoing process and the evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

The evidence for micro evolution is overwhelming. The reason we have hundreds of different breeds of dogs is because of micro evolution. Darwin discovered this and all the credit should go to him, but where the leap of faith took place was when he supposed that because we see changes within species, that therefore all life evolved from a common ancestor. This claim is not substantiated scientifically. You cannot see macro evolution taking place anywhere in the world, and you cannot find the transitional fossils to say it ever took place. You cannot test it in a laboratory, it is a historical claim based on weak circumstantial evidence.

Science doesn't know exactly how life first came about. It doesn't claim to. We know that it did because we're here, but how? Not sure. But that's not a problem, science doesn't claim to know everything. Science is a process we use to find out about the world around us. It's not a book with all the answers.

Science is all about what we don't know. It's a process of discovery, and you can't discover something you already know. Religious people like to show any gap in the knowledge of scientists as showing they are frauds, or know nothing and that this means their own views must be true. That's just a stupid logical fallacy. Just because no one else has the answer doesn't mean you can just claim your version must be correct.

Science not being able to tell us how life started has no effect on the validity of the statement 'God did it'.

The God of the gaps fallacy is simply a red herring in these conversations. I don't purport to say that because science can't explain something, that means God did it. Science is all about the principle of parsimony; what theory has the best explanatory power. I purport to say that the idea of a Creator has better explanatory power for what we see than the current scientific theories for origins, not because of what science cannot explain, but for what science has explained. I think the evidence we do understand, in physics, biology, cosmology and information theory overwhelmingly points to design for many good reasons that have nothing to do with the God of the gaps fallacy.

There is also it seems a point of pride for those who think the best position is to say "I don't know", and accusing anyone who thinks they do know as being wrong headed, arrogant, or whatever. It's a very curious position to take because there are plenty of things we can know. No one is going to take the position that if you say the answer to 2 + 2 is 4 and you deny that any other answer is valid, you are arrogant or using fallacious reasoning. Yet, it is arrogrant and fallacious to those who think that science is the sole arbitor of truth when someone who believes in God points to a Creator as the best explanation. They think that because they believe no one else could know the answer except through scientific discovery. You have to realize that is a faith based claim and not an evidence based claim. You think that way when you place your faith in science as what is going to give you the correct answers about how and why you are here. I like these quotes for Robert Jastrow, who was an Astronomer and physicist:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

"Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law."

As for the age of the earth, there's a huge amount of evidence which says it's about 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. That's plenty of time for evolution to take us from simple single cell life to the complex animals we've become today.

Have you ever studied the scientific proofs for both sides? There are some "clocks" which point that way, and there are other clocks that point the other way. The clocks that point to the old Earth have many flaws, and there are simply more evidences that point to a young Earth. That video I provided shows the evidences I am talking about.