Hmm. I agree that Trump is an incompetent egotistical blowhard, who drums up support by drastically overstating America's problems. America doesn't *need* drastic change.

...BUT, American government, particularly at the national level in Washington really is a complete trainwreck that *does* need drastic change. Both of our disgusting parties hold plenty of blame for that.

I think that the short-term damage that a Trump presidency would cause would be mitigated pretty well by the separation of powers, one of the few elements of our government that does function pretty well. And I feel like it is possible that a long-term benefit could be that Republican voters would get a hard-to-ignore lesson that the "ideals" that are spouted by their party leadership don't work. George W Bush was the best thing to happen for the Democrat party in a long time; Trump could finish the party off and let something better replace it.

Hillary is definitely more competent. In the short term, the country would definitely be better off with her at the helm than Trump. But, I don't see any long-term benefits to electing her.

Republicans would have a prime and familiar scapegoat. The legislative branch ground to a standstill with Obama in office, I think it will/would be worse with Hillary. That might actually be a good thing; it could limit the damage that they can do -- and the consequences of a shitty legislative branch are worse than a shitty president, I think.

And the Democrat party, which had a golden fucking opportunity to lead by example and actually do some exciting GOOD things with government to win voters over, instead did every dirty and questionable thing they could to guarantee that Hillary "I am the establishment" Clinton got their nomination.


Neither side deserves to win, and in fact both sides deserve to lose. I'll be voting 3rd party; not that it will accomplish anything.

Democrats, you could have had my vote if you had selected literally anybody other than Hillary. Hell, I'd probably even have voted for Hillary over Trump if she had beat Bernie fair and square without resorting to all the shady stuff (she probably would have won even without that shit).

Republicans, almost the same goes for you -- I'd pretty happily have voted for anybody other than Trump running against Hillary. Well, maybe not creepy-as-fuck Ted Cruz or some other batshit crazy option like Sarah Palin; but pretty much any of the others.

Too late now though.

*Warning I've only gone and done yet another wall of text again! This may or may not get read by anyone on here (good god I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping it), but at the very least it's formed the backbone to a video script so it's not a complete waste of my time! (he tells himself)*

This is as much @bareboards2 as yourself, but he already made it clear he wasn't willing to engage on the issue, so you're getting it instead MWAHAHAHHAHA! *coughs*

I don't wish this to come across as over condescending (though I'm sure it will none the less as I'm in one of those moods). But pretty much every (successful) comedy premise operates on the same underlying principle of irony. i.e. there is an expectation or understanding, which is deliberately subverted, and what results is comedy.

In this case, amongst other things we have the understood premises that:
A. rape is a bad, often horrific thing.
B. that there is an established social taboo about praising such behaviour.
C. that there is a section of society inherently opposed to making light of things of which they do not approve (or in a way in which they do not approve)
D. most words and phrases have an expected association and meaning.

What Jim Jefferies (an accomplished and well respected comedies amongst his peers) has done here, is take these commonly understood premises and subverted the audiences normal expectations in order to evoke a sense of irony, from which the audience derives humour and amusement.

A simple joke might take a single such premise and perform a single inversion of our expectation. e.g. my dog has no nose, how does he smell?....terrible!

By subverting our assumed meaning (that the missing nose refers to the dogs implied lack of olfactory senses), the joke creates basic irony by substituting this expected meaning for that of the odour of the dog itself.

This is of course a terrible joke, because it is as simple as a joke could be. It has only one layer of irony and lacks any sense of novelty which, might tip such a terrible joke into working for any other than the very young or simple minded.

We could of course attempt to boost this joke by adding more levels of irony contextually. e.g. a very serious or complex comedian Like say Stuart Lee, could perhaps deliver this joke in a routine and get a laugh by being completely incongruous with his style and past material.

And herein we see the building blocks from which any sophisticated professional comedy routine is built. By layering several different strands or ironic subversion, a good comedian can begin to make a routine more complex and often more than just the sum of its parts to boot.

In this case, Jim is taking the four main premises listed above, layering them and trying to find the sweetest spot of subverted expectation for each. (something which usually takes a great deal of skill and experience at this level)

He mentions the fact that his jokes incite outrage in a certain section of society because this helps to strengthen one of the strands of irony with which he is playing. The fact that he also does so in a boastful tone is itself a subversion, it is understood by the audience that he does not/should not be proud of being merely offensive and as such we have yet another strand of irony thrown into the mix.

You know how better music tends to have more and/or more complex musical things happening at once? It is the same with comedy. The more ironic threads a comedian can juggle around coherently, the more sophisticated and adept their routines could be considered to be.

Naturally as with music there's no accounting for taste as you say. Some people simply can't get past a style or associations of a given musician or song (or painting or whatever).

But dammit Jim is really one of the greats right now. Like him or lump him, the dude is pretty (deceptively) masterful at his craft.

There are at least 4-5 major threads of irony built into this bit and countless other smaller ones besides. He dances around and weaves between them like some sort of comedy ballerina. Every beat has been finely tuned over months of gig's (and years of previous material) to strike the strongest harmonies between these strands and probe for the strongest sense of dissonance in the audience. Not to mention, tone of voice, stance, timing etc.

I think Ahmed is basically terrible too, but it is because the jokes lack much semblance of complexity or nuance. Jeff Dunham's material in general feels extremely simple and seems like it uses shock as a mere crutch, rather than something deeper and more intelligent.

Taste is taste, but I feel one can to a reasonable extent criticise things like the films of Michael Bay, or the music of Justin Beiber for being objectively shallow by breaking down their material into its constituent parts (or lack thereof).

Likewise one could take the music of Wagner and while not enjoying the sound of it, still examine the complexity of it's composition and the clear superiority of skill Wagner had over most of this peers.

I guess what all this boils down to is, Jim seems to me to be clearly very very good at what he does (as he ought after all these years). Reducing his act to mere controversy feels a lot like accusing Black Sabbath of just making noise and using satanic imagery to get attention (or insert other less out of date example here).

The jokes were never at the expense of victims, they are at the expense of our expectations. He makes his own true feelings on the matter abundantly clear towards the end of the section.

As as he says himself his job is to say funny things, not to be a social activist.

I take no issue with you not liking it, but I do take issue with the suggestion that it is somehow two dimensional, or for that matter using controversy cheaply.

Offensive initial premises are some of the most ironically rich in comedy. It's like deliberately choosing the brightest paints when trying to create a striking painting. Why would you avoid the strongest materials because some people (not in your audience) find the contrast too striking?

Eh, much love anyway. This was more an exercise in intellectual masturbation than anything else. Not that I didn't mean all of it sincerely.

When I still worked for Apple, I had a safety issue escalated to engineering over a Macbook Pro. The battery had apparently ruptured and began jetting flames out of the keyboard area. The owner tried to douse it with a cheapo fire extinguisher, one of the powder ones you can get from discount stores, but it only briefly went out.

Since it was still smoking, he was going to carry it outside but, as he opened the front door, the flames started coming back. He tossed it out onto the lawn, where it burnt a big chunk of grass.

I wish I had thought to keep the pictures; it had burnt his desk and destroyed his lawn. Apple legal went out and the guy later let me know via email that they had recompensed him for his desk, replaced the notebook, and paid to have his lawn re-turfed.

It wasn't funny at the time, but this video reminded me of it and now it is kind of hilarious. Still not as good as the kid who figured out how to game Apple's escalation system to get free stuff, but pretty damn funny.

The senate and house official websites can be confusing, but you can find full voting records there.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_114_2.htm

The links under the vote tally column are what you want, and the votes were on the 20th.

Not 100% by party lines, but pretty close.

Very nearly. There was a token cross-over vote here and there, but pretty much straight partisanship. Super.

in response to the TYT comments: i really appreciate what TYT are trying to do but they need to get their shit on lock. they're too experienced to be operating like a high school news channel/early morning radio comedy show.

same with the real news but their stories are way, way better. and why can't they title their videos in any kind of coherent way?

and i feel similarly about bill maher. about 10-20% of the time he has something worth saying. he does, however, put together some awesomely bizarre groups of people, which i appreciate so long as they're allowed to speak in complete sentences.

anything from the amazing atheist or thunderf00t is just pure cringe these days. they lost the plot years ago and now just their voices sound like crying toddlers to me.

any MRA/ideologically anti-feminist stuff is also pure cringe. i'm all about critiquing ideas and i have my own critiques for parts of feminism but pretty much everything i've seen devolves to "look at this stupid fat girl" pretty quickly.

i also second what newtboy said.

anything political that bobknight posts is just a clusterfuck of wrong/partially wrong/intentionally misleading and adds nothing of substance to any discussion.



what i miss rachael maddow articles. she always seems to research and cover the facts of her stories really well.

Sorry to jump the thread here; not sure if dubious is the word either, but pretty amateur and more fear mongering with no supporting data.

First, the suggestion that no more reactors should be built because people use them to aid in production of nuclear weapons. Well kids, that ship has already sailed: In June 2014, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that nine nations (United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) possessed approx. 16,300 nuclear weapons in total. So someone builds one or 10 more? Yeah, that will matter. Someone needs to read up on the concept of deterrence.

When talking about waste: "Germany has literally tons of the stuff just laying around" - well, that's just horseshit.

Regarding accidents and number of deaths due to nuclear reactors: "devastating disasters every 30 years" - devastating? Come on, people died, but compared to other sources of energy, according to the WHO, it is by far the safest. Consider:

Energy Source Mortality Rates; Deaths/yr/TWh

Coal - world average, 161
Coal - China, 278
Coal - USA, 15
Oil - 36
Natural Gas - 4
Biofuel/Biomass - 12
Peat - 12
Solar/rooftop - 0.44-0.83
Wind - 0.15
Hydro - world, 0.10
Hydro - world*, 1.4
Nuclear - 0.04

* Includes the 170,000 deaths from the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975

So, if not dubious, certainly cheap and pedantic.

The word stereotype originally comes from printing and simply means a copy of the original, i.e. possessing the same traits. There's no evaluation, simply expectation.

The standard model for this is that stereotype leads to prejudice which leads to discrimination.

i.e. because you're wearing a bladed glove and have a mutilated face, I expect that you are some kind of nightmare monster. This leads me to a prejudice that because nightmare monsters have tried to kill me in the past, I don't like them.
Therefore, I will actively discriminate against you by throwing you in a fire.

Thought -> emotion -> action.

But pretty much everything else is right.... except I suck at basketball.

they are removing an old (maybe infected) total knee replacement.
that's what its supposed to look like (maybe not so wide of a swing with the hammer to risk contamination of the sterile field, but pretty close)

You are completely entitled to your opinion on this track.. not that fond of it myself, tbh.... but pretty much everything else you've said is simply untrue.

First up, digital instruments are still instruments. Some of them require great skill to play in real time (see Beardyman for example).

Some are authoring tools that aren't used for performance. So what? In the past, we called those kinds of tools sheet music, where a composer could write some music and have others perform it.

Second, it's not a zero-sum game. Just because some people use a sampler doesn't take away from people playing guitar.

Finally, there are literally millions of musicians still playing instruments (by which I'm assuming you mean traditional instruments like strings, percussion, wind, etc). With the web as a distribution and learning tool, it has never been easier to learn, write and record music. So if you want to listen to rock or classical or blues or jazz or soul or funk or metal or folk or any combination thereof, it's out there. Go look for it.

Seems more like an impression of Andy Samberg's impression, but pretty funny regardless.

Not going to tag it horrorshow, but pretty darn ehh..

Grabbing at a gun is immediate grounds for deadly force in every case, law, home, etc. I only say this because the suspect obviously upped the ante to that zone with no regard for human life. Second, "witnesses" were there to see it all...that's not a good thing and ups the ante far, far more... witnesses are either friends or someone the cop has no idea who they are. That means they are potentially dangerous, especially in a city where blacks (by their own heartfelt admissions) HATE white police officers with a huge passion. I am not saying the racists are not justified, as they clearly have been profiled and such, but this is clearly the case. No confusion should ever arise in dispute of the fact that bystanders are different than potential dangers. If the officer does taze and someone gets involved, he is a dead mother fucker because now he is occupied with a screaming, shitting-self man who is 100% willing to murder him, as already displayed, and someone else. Lastly, the tazer does not always work. And when the tazer does work, immediately afterwards you are 100% capable of using your body to 100% again. Most people think that then tazer magically incapacitates someone for a long time. No--when you release that trigger the tazer's effects are over.
In my opinion deadly force is not the last option. It is the option right before you die.

Now the responses are, for certain, based on stupid choices. The chief trying to minimize was what we all do but pretty dumb. You ever comfort a kid that he might not be hurt so he doesn't feel pain or freak out? Happens, even if the kid is really really hurt and the ambulance is on the way. Stupid choice...and the releasing of the video is iffy at best. What pisses me off most is that it was not meant to calm down the violence, but to appease the nation's view of Ferguson's white people...

Hi,
Some times the most recently promoted video is shown in a more expanded view, I believe. I don't know how it works - but pretty soon my promoted video will sink lower down on the page, just like the others..

Cannabis is the closest thing I've seen to a silver bullet "cure" type thingy. But pretty much every edible plant (sans chemical agents) is going to combat cancer in one way or another. Going full raw vegan is a good start. Your body's alkalinity will also need to stay above 7.0. This will happen by itself with a good diet. Then there's your thought life, your stress levels, and on and on.