I know a lot of the impact of that is down to editing, and picking the best examples from the people who fell for it worst, but it's still hilarious and wonderfully executed. I have no doubt that there were plenty of other examples to pick from. *promote

4-5 examples from one book, plus a single quote about a girl wanting a big dick from a second (written by a woman, incidentally). I assume that these were pretty much the best examples they could find.

I do agree that if the school board spent 1.8 million dollars on these books that would be a waste, but I somehow doubt that happened.

This ONE guy didn't give the best example of proof of global warming, so ALL GLOBAL WARMING SCIENCE MUST BE FAKE!

mmmk.. cool.

When science becomes political it becomes corrupted and hence discredited.

Global warmer/gender/ abortion are the best examples.

That was honestly one of the best examples of a Rube Goldberg I’ve ever seen!

To be fair, I'm sure that examples could be found of media personalities praising Obama/Clinton for similar stuff that they ragged Bush Sr./Jr. for. Best example off the top of my head might be Bush's "terrible war crimes" vs Obama's "brilliant use of drones".

Now, that all comes with a big disclaimer from me. I disliked Obama's expansion of drone bombing, flip-flop in in-office stance vs campaign stance on whistleblower protection, etc. But, I'd still personally evaluate Bush's, uh, miscues as overwhelmingly worse than Obama's. All I'm saying is that there have certainly been talking heads that have been hypocritical in the other direction before.

That being said, this clip takes it to a whole other level. This isn't nuanced, this is blatant. The only rational explanation is that Fox News simply is that biased, shamelessly so (no surprise to most of us). The problem is that Fox News' audience isn't particularly swayed by rational explanations.

I think clearing that "reality distortion field" is something that takes lots of time and lots of indisputable evidence. That's why I basically hope that Trump gets plenty of leash to try (and fail) to fulfill all of his ridiculous promises and self-hype. Nothing like a pointless and decaying border wall to serve as a reminder to be careful about who's cult of personality you get sucked into...

Forgot maybe the best example, last year Black Lives Matters Toronto shutdown the Toronto Pride parade to impose demands on the Pride organisation. A demand that the police be excluded from future Pride parades being a key demand that Pride had to agree to before the parade was able to continue.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/pride-parade-toronto-1.3662823


The special interest groups up here are graduating from taking on the "white supremacist"(their words) government in our country and are fully turning on each other now. BLM versus pride and Transgender rights versus Feminists, and on...

Funny how the taunts right-wingers use to describe lefties (such as 'snowflake') are actually far more true of themselves.

They value 'manliness', toughness, and martial abilities above all else, but it seems like every one of them found some way to avoid serving in the military (though Ted Nugent literally shitting his pants is still the best example of that particular cowardice).

When it comes down to it, they're all a bunch of lying, cowardly, sissy men, and sometimes I wish Barack Obama would step into the ring with Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, or Donald (or hell, I'd do it if given a chance, but nobody knows who I am, so that's not very likely).

The examples in this video (picture wise) are bad.

A big point in 'the prince' was that one needs to appear as a good person, regardless of whether or not you are or are not good.

Hence the best examples would be people who were perceived as virtuous, when they behind the scenes were sometimes not [when they needed to be not virtuous in order to achieve their goals].

Showing plenty of examples of people historically perceived as villains, is actually not the point. In fact, Machiavelli makes a point of how being perceived as bad runs a high risk of ending your reign.

One example in the book is of a ruler who assigns a man to ruthlessly crush disorder in a city. The man ruthlessly crushes disorder, and earns the hatred of the citizens. The ruler comes to the city, kills the man (cuts off his head and takes it out to show people), and claims to have liberated the people from this abusive man. In doing so, he both swiftly eliminates the disorder, demonstrates his authority, and ends up appearing as the good guy (one who cares for the suffering of the people and earns the people's appreciation).




The prince is a historical case study of different rulers throughout history, their circumstances, their intentions, their actions, and their success/failure, and what functional elements interconnected these factors. It's a game theory analysis for monarchs. Primarily technical (morality outside of its scope, morality being neither promoted nor admonished).

(The prince was not Machiavelli's personal opinion of how one should act - he personally preferred virtue and the republic. Personal preference was not the point of 'the prince'.)

-scheherazade

Well, what pisses off me about racism in the States is that we enslaved people for 200+ years, made them live in shacks and treated them like cattle. We pretty much stripped them of dignity and all that is human to the point where many of them believed it, then we said: "Hey, you are free now, so act like us!" What in the funking funk is that kind of logic? Do we expect them to say, "Thanks for the freedom, now I'll just erase the indoctrination and all the memory and I'll magically be jolly jumping ideal citizen like the best examples of your race." What adequate tools did we give them to re-engage in society?

We often expect a tabula rasa from African Americans when in fact we ruined them and should heavily reinvest in them for at least a few decades, if not centuries. Racism based on half-assed logic boils my blood more than pure racism.

Then you end up with people taping mags together and reloading within a second or so.
Even faster if they count shots and stop firing at capacity-1 before reloading.
There are work-arounds...




Realistically, the end game of the political left is a gun ban + confiscation. The end game of the political right is total gun deregulation.
Each side needs something to argue to excuse their existence, so they will argue in their direction so long as there is anything left to argue, and those are the natural consequences.
Gridlock is literally the best thing that can happen for folks in the middle.




Syria isn't the best example. The people were not armed, and they turned to foreign auxiliaries to fight for them. They invited and gave shelter to all sorts of foreign militants to fight against their government, and made a mess of things. They would have been better off with a home-grown insurgency.

Not like a home grown insurgency would have done much good either way. The Syrian Arab spring was a democratic call for ... Islamic law. It originated in Hama, where an earlier Islamic insurgency was put down (the muslim brotherhood) by Assad's father. Half the country didn't support the insurgency against Assad, and anyone who is non-muslim or secular, or even moderate, is sitting on Assad's side of the country hoping he holds out.

But generally speaking, insurgency with small arms is what defeats occupiers over time. Not in pitched battles, but by making occupation so expensive and tedious that the occupier loses interest over time.


-schehearazde

I thought the video made a good point, but rather different from the one I assumed it was going for before watching.

As I was finishing up my senior year of High School after 4 years of taking crap for being a nerd etc., a friend/acquaintance of mine was starting her freshman year. She got picked on also, probably worse than I had had it. She made it through 1 semester before dropping out. Then she got a part time job for a half-year, took night classes at the local community college, and got her GED.

At the time, I thought she was making a terrible decision by not sticking it out and trying to get through High School the usual way -- 4 years of hell. But then, the next year she ended up at the same University where I was, both as Uni-freshmen, and she handled the much more mature University environment just fine.

It ended up completely turning the tables for me, to the point that I thought that her path of dropping out -> GED -> Uni was actually objectively superior to my suffering through the more traditional path.

So, that's what I thought "don't stay in school" was going to refer to.


But the actual message is good as well. The best classes that I had in Middle and High School were more practical things. But oddly enough, the best examples of that for me were my math classes. I had the same teacher for Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, and Calculus (AP, so equivalent to Calc 1 at a University). He stressed the real-life applications of advanced mathematics by doing lots of word problems, and only teaching topics that he could point to concrete, real-world applications for. And by letting us use calculators for everything as long as we could explain WHY specific operations were needed to answer the questions.


...So, long-winded response boiled down:
I like the message. More practical stuff in school is better. And feel free to drop out -- especially if doing so is just a shortcut to further education at a University, Vo-Tech, or whatever.

That's patently false. It's not racist to depict true personality traits that are popular or common in a culture.

I've witnessed many American couples on many occasions discuss and demonstrate their disapproval about sharing their food. The best example that my wife and I often laugh about was an older couple where the wife was reaching over to pick at something small (maybe a french fry) and the husband with a scowl completely seriously and angrily slapped the back of her hand to stop her.

No, not all westerners or Americans would do such a thing, nor do all have a problem with their partner picking at their food, but that's because there isn't ANYTHING that EVERYONE of ANY race does, except breathe and poop, but it is a common thing in this culture.

There is still plenty of optimistic sci-fi out there (Iain M. Banks Culture novels are probably the best example).

But the problem that most sci-fi writers have is that they're generally reasonably smart people who look at the world, look at what we're doing to it and say "yeah, we're fucked".

I have every confidence that if we worked together science could solve all the problems facing us today.

I have zero confidence that we will actually do that.

1) Northern Europe is the closest comparison income wise to the US besides Japan which is culturally very different. I don't think it's unreasonable to aggregate these countries in comparing. There isn't going to be a perfect example, but Russia is very far from it.

Your argument about the death penalty is a null point because what you're proposing is impractical and thus not worth debating.

2) & 3) Greenland has a GDP per capita of 22K and is a highly idiosyncratic example given its population density. I think that's pretty much self evident. If Greenland is your best example I think I've proven my point.

I have no doubt that greater surveillance and enforcement will reduce crime rates. I'm not disputing that. Technology will naturally improve this through the likes of ever improving facial recognition. But I don't think a UK style CCTV policing system would be affordable given that the US is less densely populated in cities. As for enforcement, I don't think there's been a lack of money thrown in that direction. The issue, as this video points out, is more that if it was targeted at violent rather than drug offenders the overall benefit to society would be greater. There I would not disagree.

4)

Germany and the Netherlands are other examples where it has worked:

http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/14/some-european-prisons-are-shrinking-and-closing-what-can-america-learn

What you're proposing (visa vi death penalty) is something no democratic country has accepted (or will, I think). What I propose is at least accepted by to a large extent by many European developed countries. The US may shift eventually if it is recognised the current policies have been consistently failing.

5)

Yes there are many reasons why Venezuela is not a fair example. I think you make my point. Surveillance and enforcement are both necessary to reduce crime. Of course if you pick countries distinctly lacking in them then it supports your case.

But I'm arguing about which would be better given the baseline of current US policy. I think you would agree that both surveillance and enforcement are of a much higher standard in the US, with largely meritocratic and corruption free police forces. If that's the case then other developed countries, with roughly similar incomes and therefore tax revenues to afford comparable police force standards are a good reference. Venezuela is not.