Why it take so long to sift, You crazy people you.

Beck has to be publicly ridiculed. My biggest fear is that we may get a nutjob liberal pull a copycat act on the "other" side, making a whole other 15% of the people in the US functionally crazy. All of a sudden we've got a nation with 30% loud, crazy people fighting each other and the sensible majority will be caught in the middle.

It may feel like we're there right now, but it could get much worse. It is truly shameful to exploit the people's fears for ratings and endorsements. This guy is a cancer on the populous of our country.

I am glad people were against these crazy people. What a sick world we have.

>> ^spawnflagger:
any US interstate highway is certainly capable of supporting 100 mph speeds. It's just the other drivers that make it dangerous.


And the laws of physics... This isn't the Indy 500 and your cars aren't built to have decent maneuverability at >100mph, so there's a vastly increased chance of multi-car pile-ups if everybody's going that fast. Even on the autobahn only a few crazy people in the fastest lane exceed 110mph.

I've never heard a scientist say that climate change was 100% man-made... only ever heard it from crazy people. Just that our actions can be contributing to it and that we should utilize any technology and practices that will reduce our impact on the environment.

Ha... isn't Arianna Huffington one of the crazy people the Rally to Restore Sanity is rallying against?

Wall of text in 3... 2... 1...

@Gallowflak

Let me go post by post here...

Yogi asks why he should care. He states that he hasn't seen any solid proof that COS has caused any deaths. He thinks they're stupid and crazy, and there's not much you can do about stupid, crazy people.

It seems to me the correct response, if you disagree with him, would be to provide examples. Instead, GK starts building a chorus line of straw men. Yogi is a sick fuck. Every time Yogi asks a skeptical question, God kills a kitten.

Your first response is solid. You don't present evidence, but you do clearly explain why you have a problem with COS.

Yogi tells GK that he doesn't see enough evidence that they're a large problem; There are bigger problems that require attention. Obviously you disagree with this, but it's a valid position and there are no fallacies or childish outbursts.

Yogi replies to you, listing some examples of things he perceives as bigger problems that are more deserving of attention. Scientologists account for about .0007% of the world population and these people are joining voluntarily. The numbers are something I just looked up, but it's one of Yogi's points. I'd say it's a very insightful one.

You say prioritizing problems is irrational and ridiculous, but you don't say why. I'd be interested to hear you back that up.

GK says little boys are apparently shipped in bulk to Catholics so that they may be raped and adds another strawman to the line.

Yogi gets a little irrational with his argument here, saying GK is crazy. He compares arguing over this to arguing over 9/11 conspiracies, which is misunderstood by just about everyone to be categorizing the two of them as equivalents.

You call Yogi out on his poor argument though, in my opinion, you overplay it. You also add a strawman to the party by misrepresenting his statement about 9/11 conspiracies. You seem shocked that someone would respond with hostility to being called an irrational, thick-skulled, sick fuck who might kill kittens.

GK's next post is a response to me, which I'll address in a separate comment.

Yogi calling you a liar was not on screen when I wrote my comment. That was quite bad form. Things have somewhat degraded since then.

And now I come to your response to me. I said he was fairly calm and collected. He did wander toward poor form as I mentioned above. I can actually claim he was fairly calm and collected and, in fact, I did. You say I can't. Why not?

You bring up the 9/11 thing again. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you just misread it because you don't seem like you're interested in misrepresenting his argument on purpose. Or maybe you are since you've also twisted his statement about this argument not accomplishing anything to mean that GK will never accomplish anything.

He "blasted" GK, who frankly could use a blasting after that temper tantrum, and yet you, who claims to value honest, productive debate, defend GK. Nothing anyone could say would degrade GK any more than his own "argument", which really doesn't fit any formal definition of "argument" that I recognize. So who has disdain for for his opponents, again?

It wasn't so much my intent to defend Yogi as it was to point out perceived hypocrisy in you calling him out for childish behavior and saying nothing about GK.

Are you referring to me or Yogi doing a drive-by assessment? I'm not clear on this one.

The comment system has been broked for months. It's sort of been broke by design since the 4.0 upgrade and then it also doesn't work as designed, which, I guess, makes it double-broked.

I was implying GK needed a time-out, not you.

Like I said, I knew others would disagree, and I am sure that the submitter had the best of intentions.

I just wanted to make sure I left a reason for downvoting, I do it very very rarely and I think people deserve to know why people downvote.

>> ^ponceleon:

>>
I have to disagree. This is no way glorifies it and if anything will make it so that this person will likely get caught. There have been numerous cases where the internet community has been able to track down crazy people like this thanks to videos such as this one. If I remember correctly there was a case where some kid was boasting about abusing an animal and was later caught thanks to 4chan or something... I'll have to look it up.
Edit: yup... arrests were made. http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/2324917.html Don't eff with the Internets!

>> ^necrontyr:

Sorry, downvote on this one. I cannot in good conscience see this as a valuable addition to the sift. It is like glorifying that woman rather than trying to ignore her.
I know some will disagree and argue that the sift will help get the word out, but I respectfully disagree and think this video, while likely submitted with the best intentions, has no place on the sift.


I have to disagree. This is no way glorifies it and if anything will make it so that this person will likely get caught. There have been numerous cases where the internet community has been able to track down crazy people like this thanks to videos such as this one. If I remember correctly there was a case where some kid was boasting about abusing an animal and was later caught thanks to 4chan or something... I'll have to look it up.

Edit: yup... arrests were made. http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/2324917.html Don't eff with the Internets!

Crazy people against the Federal Reserve / WTO / IMF system??

Are you fucking insane??

Imagine if we had a gold standard and actual secured and backed monetary policy?
We wouldn't all be poor in a few years. Everyone is going to get fucked over hard by IMF and central banks, learn history and how the Great Depression was made 10x worse by this magical bank of yours.

Our govt doesn't even have any oversight over the federal reserve or their decisions and you might want to google and find out what country the Fed actual resides in.

>> ^NordlichReiter:

And Democrats aren't corrupt? Someone needs to come down from that tower.

I didn't say that, but there's a matter of degrees. Republican corruption usually involves outright devastation to people's lives for profit (let's "privatize" social security, let's start a war to get oil rights, let's pretend the environment is indestructible), whereas Democratic corruption usually presents itself as siding with Republicans on whatever horrific scheme they're looking to implement, plus they get involved in some of the "traditional" corruption -- funneling public money into private hands in return for campaign contributions -- though they seem to do this to much smaller degrees than Republicans do.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
Netrunner, I can think of one thing. The 1913 Federal Reserve act. Woodrow Wilson member of the Democratic Party.
I did add the qualifier "In my lifetime" for a reason. That said, the Federal Reserve Act was a good thing. Only crazy people are against the idea of having a central bank at this point. I may want more firm oversight to ensure it's not being mismanaged, but that's wholly different from declaring the very idea evil.

Plus, while I'm not going to try to defend Woodrow Wilson against nonspecific charges, I should point out that it's not as if his name evokes the same effect as Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, or even Herbert Hoover in people.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
How about the repealing of the Glass Steagall Act, President Bill Clinton?

...and Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. So Clinton's failing was that he didn't fight the Republicans like the left of his party wanted him to. Still fits my description.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
How about the current president and Habeus Corpus for Bagram Airforce base detainees?

You mean the rights denied them by a 5-4 decision (5 Conservative vs. 4 Liberals) of the Roberts Supreme Court?

>> ^NordlichReiter:
Preservation of extraordinary rendition? Escalation of Afghanistan? Violations of Pakistani sovereignty?

The Afghanistan war was started by Bush, as were the violations of Pakistani sovereignty (though it seems unlikely that we are really operating without Pakistan's approval). Again, the worst you can say here is that Democrat Obama has been insufficiently anti-Republican in his stance, something I would agree with as a general criticism of Obama. He isn't as left as I wish he was.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
You know what don't answer those questions. I don't want to see any more rationalizations for the two parties today. Freedom of choice be damned.


Ahh, so I am to let your eminently answerable questions stand as if I had no answer for them? Talk about limiting freedom of choice...

What's limiting your choice isn't what the two parties are doing, it's your view that there's nothing you can do to a) change how the Democratic or Republican parties do things, or b) form your own party around a platform that would appeal to an untapped coalition of voters.

>> ^L0cky:
Btw, I had schizophrenia between the age of 6 and 10. From this video I can say it was probably far milder than what this little girl is going through. It wasn't a pleasant time in my childhood and it's something I've never shared with anyone. It mostly affected me whenever I felt tired or bored; and always when I was alone. As I had no way to express what was happening and even at that age was aware of how crazy people were treated, I never told anyone. Only at the age of about 17, when reading a psychological thriller novel that happened to be prefaced with a medical description of schizophrenia (rather than crappy Hollywood style split personality portrayals) did I actually realise what I had gone through.
Strangely, and thankfully, it all ended rather suddenly one day when I was about 10. I was alone, and got extremely frustrated and demanded as loud as I could in my head that it stop; then I refused to entertain the thoughts ever again. In the 10 years after I probably felt something like it again on two occasions; both very mild and I just accepted it and it went away in seconds. In the last 10 years I've been completely fine.
/me sharing


Though an active imagination may be linked to schizophrenia, it isn't. I too went through an similar thing with an active imagination from about 3-10: "seeing" animals coming out of the bath tap, "seeing" the visage of death in every dark room, not being able to stop narratives from going on in my mind. And I too, got sick of it and made it stop. But thats not what schizophrenia is.

kceaton's basically getting at the fact that our sense of reality is a summation of our sensory input, with noise filtered out, and then combined with our ability to estimate missing information; and simulate the near and far future, based on both logic and experience. You get a good sense of all this from optical illusions.

Each of those components are variable, and there's a lot of dependencies in that which would cause your perception of reality at any given moment to differ if changed.

I think the heart of what he's getting at is that if there are so many variables to create a resolved reality, and which can differ from person to person; can we say there is really a single canonical 'true reality'; or are our experiences a personal and fluctuating abstraction?

It also leaves you to wonder what your identity is. I think many people feel that their identity refers to something real and solid; whereas these considerations show serious flaws in that concept.

I believe the filtering, and simulation parts of that process are what we refer to as 'rationale', and are grounded by empathising with others. That gives us reference points for what is sane, and what is noise. I think that's also what leads to social interactions such as fashions and trends; as well as the ability for groups of people to 'drink the kool-aid' and be irrational together.

Btw, I had schizophrenia between the age of 6 and 10. From this video I can say it was probably far milder than what this little girl is going through. It wasn't a pleasant time in my childhood and it's something I've never shared with anyone. It mostly affected me whenever I felt tired or bored; and always when I was alone. As I had no way to express what was happening and even at that age was aware of how crazy people were treated, I never told anyone. Only at the age of about 17, when reading a psychological thriller novel that happened to be prefaced with a medical description of schizophrenia (rather than crappy Hollywood style split personality portrayals) did I actually realise what I had gone through.

Strangely, and thankfully, it all ended rather suddenly one day when I was about 10. I was alone, and got extremely frustrated and demanded as loud as I could in my head that it stop; then I refused to entertain the thoughts ever again. In the 10 years after I probably felt something like it again on two occasions; both very mild and I just accepted it and it went away in seconds. In the last 10 years I've been completely fine.

/me sharing

Okay, well you go off admiring and laughing at crazy people then, and I'll continue down-voting freak shows.

My parents inherited some property when my grandma passed, where she used to live before she became to frail to live alone. There was a stray cat explosion there around the time she moved out of the house. Still had to maintain the place, and you'd see upwards of 20 stray cats at times. There were maybe two houses there who were guilty of buying/taking in animals they didn't properly care for. Since you can get in trouble with dogs more easily than cats, these same people tended to keep them locked in their yards slowly starving and dehydrating them. The cats roamed free, bred like crazy. People generally try to keep them fed, but it's roughly 50-75 bucks a cat to get them checked for feline leukemia and then neutered/spayed... and roughly the same if they test positive for feline leukemia and have to be put down because they'll kill all the other cats eventually if returned. And it seems like an injustice to capture them and have them all put down when they aren't hurting anyone or attacking people's pets.

Only thing that can help the problem is stricter laws on pet owners, because allowing people to continually take in/buy/adopt pets and slowly torture them to death via extreme heat/cold/lack of food/water/no vaccinations/medical treatment is not being punished severely enough to stop it. It's just too wrong to see it happen and know the law won't punish them enough to deter others.