That's not how democracy or press conferences work.

1: journalists absolutely do NOT have to accept a politicians answer. They are fully entitled to demand a real answer.

2: they're also entitled to follow up questions. Acostas behaviour is completely normal for any member of the press and far less "rude" than anything Fox News did to Obama.

And as for CNN coverage of Trump's achievements....
*related=https://videosift.com/video/CNN-Red-Pills-itself-The-Economy-is-GREAT

Acosta knew damn well he was on this ice yet provoked this response.
That's right.
Provoked.
I agree with what you said about this backward moving government in many areas but the office of the president still needs to be respected.
As you said the childish antics of the Democrats aren't helping.
We need a mature opposition not outlandish behaviour.

Lots of good comments here... this might take a while so bear with me.

@Mordhaus, I haven't read that book but I'd be interested to see his sources. Everything I've googled suggests the rate is really low.

As for Ford, obviously, I can't say for certain whether she is telling the truth. She may even believe she is telling the truth and still be wrong. I think she was entitled to the benefit of the doubt in terms of an investigation. Of course, it's possible she was doing this for political reasons, but that feels like a stretch to me.

@bcglorf
In some ways, I can understand the desire to remove the vexatious complaints cause. Coming forward with a report of sexual assault is traumatic enough already.
A) you may not be believed
B) even if you are, you're in for an experience many assault survivors have described as "being raped a second time"
If you add the possibility that your complaint could potentially get you sanctioned if no one believes you, that's a pretty awful situation to be in.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with this stance, but I can understand it. I think you would need to clear a very high bar to prove a complaint is malicious. Presumption of innocence applies to the complainant also.

"The first 3 levels of sexual violence ALL involve no physical contact and are entirely verbal. "
100% fine with this. You can be a creepy sleazebag without touching someone and it's still not ok.

"lots of people are very much arguing that lives should be destroyed then and there"
Sorry, I just don't see it. That said, if there are people arguing for that... I'm against them.

"We'll even right songs to laugh at them when they complain."
This song was mocking the bullshit "it's a scary time to be a man" line, and deservedly so. I'm a man, and I'm not scared of being accused of sexual assault. None of my male friends are scared either. But it fucking crushes my soul to think of how many of the women in my life have ACTUALLY experienced some form of sexual assault (and that's just the ones I know of).

@scheherazade
Completely agree that eyewitness testimony is borderline useless in terms of evidence. Go back through my comment history... you'll see I even said I doubt you could prove Kavanaugh's guilt. All I've ever said is that it warrants an investigation. (sidenote: I totally agree with @vil and @Mordhaus on this... polygraphs are junk science, but Kavanaugh's boorish behaviour should have been grounds not to confirm him).

Regarding your friend that was raped by a girl: that's awful, and yes, we really have to stop this childish attitude of somehow thinking female on male rape is either funny or that the guy was lucky. But it is unrelated to this discussion.

@MilkmanDan, I pretty much agree with everything you've said.

Being falsely accused of rape would be terrible, even if you weren't convicted. No disagreement there at all.

It depends on what I did as a drunken minor.

I've done some stupid shit in my time, but somehow I've managed to avoid sexually assaulting anyone.

If Kavanaugh IS guilty, then fuck him. The fact that he's managed to not assault someone since then ISN'T praiseworthy, it's the literal lowest bar for basic human behaviour.

I agree that we can't really know if he did it, but my problem is with the people brushing it off as a youthful indiscretion.

Whatever about the truth of the matter, I fully agree that this is a stalling tactic being used by the Democrats, but given the potential stakes, I can't say I blame them.

Come on @newtboy

She was being coached, she did smash her racket, she did run her mouth.

Not every instance of coaching gets caught. Unlucky or bad execution.

Most smashings of rackets are punished.

Do men really get away with that level of verbal abuse?
I believe she in fact got a lot of leeway because she is Serena, black and at home.

Preferably she should have gotten a sterner warning first to shut up or be hit with a game penalty.

She would be out of a basketball game, football game, golf tournament. In baseball and hockey she would be mocked for being a crybaby.

Men should not get away with this childish behaviour either.

As a parent of only one kid, I've been lucky because my daughter never threw tantrums, probably due to the lack of an antagonistic sibling. Watching this though makes me wonder what sort of parent(s) these kids have. Parents should shut that shit down quickly and decisively - children learn what is appropriate, socially, by observation and being corrected by adults; this really isn't good conflict resolution. Yeah, siblings will fight over stupid stuff, but this sort of behaviour, if not corrected, will also probably extend to school and lead to negative interactions with their peers.

There is a generally held belief that consciousness is a mystery of science or a miracle of faith; that consciousness was attained instantly (or granted by god), and that one has either attained self awareness or has not.

I don't believe any of that. I believe like all things in biology, consciousness evolved to maximise a benefit, and occurred gradually, without any magic or mystery. The closest exurb1a gets to that is when he says at 6:28:

"Maybe evolution accidentally made some higher mammals on Earth self-aware because it's better for problem solving or something"

We need to know what other people are thinking and this is the problem that consciousness solves. If a neighbouring tribe enters your territory then predicting whether they come to trade, mate, steal or attack is beneficial to survival.

Initially this may be done through simulation - imagining the future based on past experience. A flood approaching your cave is bad news. Being surrounded by lions is not good. Surrounding a lone bison is dinner. Being charged by a screaming tribe is an upcoming fight.

We could only simulate another person's actions, but we had no experience that allows us to simulate another person's thoughts. You may predict that giving your hungry neighbour a meal may suppress their urge to raid your supplies but you still can't simply open their head and see what they are thinking.

Then for the benefit of cooperation and coordination, we started to talk, and everything changed.

Communication not only allows us to speak our mind, but allows us to model the minds of others. We can gain an understanding of another person's motivations long before they act upon them. The need to simulate another person's thoughts becomes more nuanced and complex. Do they want to trade, or do they want to cheat?

Yet still we cannot look into the minds of others and verify our models of them. If we had access to an actual working brain we could gradually strengthen that model with reference to how an actual brain works, and we happen to have access to such a brain, our own!

If we monitored ourselves then we could validate a general model of thought against real urges, real experiences, real problem solving and real motivations. Once we apply our own selves to a model of thought we become much better at modelling the thoughts of others.

And what better way to render that model than with speech itself? To use all of our existing cognitive skills and simply simulate others sharing their thoughts with us.

At 3:15 exurb1a referenced a famous experiment that showed that we make decisions before we become aware of them. This lends evidence to suppose that our consciousness is not the driver of our thoughts, but a monitor - an interpretation of our subconscious that feeds our model of how people think.

Not everybody is the same. We all have different temperaments. Some of us are less predictable than others, and we tend to avoid such people. Some are more amenable to co-operation, others are stubborn. To understand the temperament of one we must compare them to another. If we are to compare the model of another's mind to our own, and we simulate their mind as speech, then we must also simulate our own mind as speech. Then not only are we conscious, we are self-aware.

Add in a feedback loop of social norms, etiquette, acceptable behaviour, expected behaviour, cooperation and co-dependence, game theory and sustainable societies and this conscious model eventually becomes a lot more nuanced than it first started - allowing for abstract concepts such as empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, resentment, contempt, kinship, friendship, nurture, pride, and love.

Consciousness is magical, but not magic.

Jesus, what a fucking idiot. He put everyone at risk because he was too impatient to wait.

The fact that it turned out ok does not in any way excuse his behaviour.

I also end up something else when watching Chris Angel. Although, I usually end up being the guy switching to HBO a quarter of the way through. It's the ridiculous behaviour of the "completely unassociated public group" surrounding him.

First login in about 4 years to say: fuck this parent.

Distract your child, don't video them. You're making a bigger thing out of this by videoing them. They know what that fucking phone in your hand is you asshole. They know it means: "I'm getting attention for this behaviour."

@newtboy

"Discriminating against people for their legal, culturally accepted, natural behavior makes the person doing the discriminating an asshole. "

Slavery also exists in nature, so it's natural, and once upon a time it was legal and culturally accepted. Discriminating against slave owners though, even back than, is contrary to your claim, quite noble.

"The space study with twins showed that in under a year their genes permanently diverged a full 7%"

You gotta be careful there exactly what is being measured, they did not find that fully 7% of his DNA changed and now was that different. Depending what you measure people also claim that human and chimp DNA only differs by less than 2%...


"Twins aren't genetically identical, even at birth. ...That makes twin studies a piss poor method of gene study."

If you read your own linked article it states:
Twins share the same genes but their environments become more different as they age. This unique aspect of twins makes them an excellent model for understanding how genes and the environment contribute to certain traits, especially complex behaviors and diseases.

If you bother to read the list of peer reviewed articles I linked, they are comparing mono-zygotic twins to di-zygotic twins. The very basic and largely accepted theory being that if a trait has a genetic component, 1000 twins split from the same zygote should share the trait more often than di-zygotic twins.

My argument though really doesn't care much though. I simply argue that beliefs, choices and behaviours are the result of free will and grounds to judge(discriminate) for and against those you deem good or bad, hurtful or harmful. Similarly, gender, race and ethnicity being things that are in zero way the result of free will and beyond the control of an individual and NOT grounds to judge(discriminate) for or against.

"A twin study of self-reported psychopathic personality traits"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902001848

Perhaps the above is more to the point. Similar twin study showing identical twins having similarly significant genetic component to psychopathy as the prior studies show for sexual orientation.

Should we be similarly upset at people assigning morality to psychopathic behaviours?

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religious Interests, Attitudes, and Values: A Study of Twins Reared Apart and Together"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062599?seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents

Religiosity shows the same thing, strong correlations for identical twins, raised apart from one another, and much weaker correlations for non-identical twins also raised apart.

If Tom Cruise claims his belief in Scientology is a birth right and how dare we judge him, is he really backed by the science?

Where I am coming from, is insisting that for all the factors involved in human decision and behaviours, I still want to conduct ourselves as though free will exists.

More importantly, the freedom to discriminate against people based upon their behaviours must be defended as strongly as the right to discriminate based upon purely in born, unchangeable attributes like race, gender and ethnicity must be opposed.

, I said it was more controversial.

I dare say even agreeing that we don't solely choose our sexual interests, when it comes to our actions I insist we treat those as the result of free will, aka choice.

When I'm not typing from a 4in screen I can pull up the references, but the peer reviewed studies on genetics hardly illustrate that sexual orientation and identity are dominated by it. Twins studies do show that identical twins more often share orientation than non-identical, which gives a correlation to genetics. However, I'll pull up the studies but last I reviewed them, more than half the identical twins in the studies did NOT share the same orientation. That is an arguably compelling indicator that genetics does not solely determine orientation.

Other twin studies comparing other behaviours like religion show a similar pattern. Studies with twins on violent and aggressive behaviour show an even stronger "genetic" component than the orientation studies, and nobody has any qualms about being politically incorrect declaring that violence is a choice and not a birth attribute...

Glad to hear you stating things as you did, I largely agree with you.

The trick playing out in Canada now is that because we've expanded the definition of protected classes more quickly than the US, the protected classes rights are interfering more and more.

I do not believe that religion should be a protected class in the same way as race, gender or ethnicity. Similarly sexual orientation and gender identity shouldn't be either. Race, Gender and ethnicity are all assigned at birth and can largely be determined by blood test and demonstrated to be something entirely outside an individuals control, choice and behaviour.

Religion is the most easily demonstrated as deserving a different status of protection than the others in that most religions ALL hold the others as heretical. Declaring other faiths immoral is necessary to religious freedom and I take as the very positive basis of America's freedom of religion notion being a wonderful agreement between Catholics and Protestants to agree to disagree over war.

More controversially, I would also class your sexual preferences and identity in with religion as a different degree of protected class. There is an element of behaviour and choice here that can not be determined at birth with any manner of blood test or parental bloodline.

More simply, the right to discriminate should not exist for immutable things people are born to and remain beyond their choice or control, while the right to discriminate based upon behaviours is entirely necessary and important. If you want to believe Scientology can help you heal broken limbs and transcend the world your free to it, but I'm gonna treat you differently than a sane person. To similarly treat someone different based upon race or gender though is unacceptable.

Perhaps my emphasis on the words "no one" was a bit much but while riding I'm much less trusting of driver behaviour than when I'm in my car because the outcome of a collision will greatly favour the driver. So yes, obviously you have to trust people to an extent but you have to keep aware of careless inattention, maliciousness, etc.

I've ridden for about 8 years now (for fitness/competition) and have seen and experienced some crazy shit where I ride (primarily rural roads, some small towns, etc). I will never forget the time an older gentleman waved me down for directions while I was riding. I cut my interval short, turned around, and helped point him in the right direction. As I resumed my ride, he blew by me without leaving me much room, startling me as I had let my guard down trusting that this guy was going to pass me safely. I was shocked.

So yeah, I'm very wary of all drivers when riding.