This isn't one of those things you can discuss in isolation. There does exist the problem of violent criminals that refuse to listen to any and all authority. When you have free citizen that murders somebody, if you are lucky enough to catch and convict them they go to jail. Some of these folks continue to violently attack other inmates. Some even continue to violent attack the prison guards when they come in to try and stop that. There comes a point where the question is what to we do? Just how many resources do we expend working with individuals hell bent on abusing the rights and bodies of everyone else around them? Western legal systems have already ruled any form of punishment through physical force as out of the question, so self preservation isn't a motivation. There exist scenarios where the only option left for protecting people from an individual is isolation.

It's good to do our best to treat even the worst elements of society with the highest standard possible. The trouble is in practice failing to punish certain actions with imprisonment or isolation leads to predictable abuse of otherwise innocent bystanders.

Are you familiar with Zheng He? He led expeditions to east Africa in the early 1400s. Nobody in east Africa speaks chinese.
Of course you know Christopher Columbus. All of south America speaks spanish now. With the exception of Brazil, they speak portuguese thanks to some Pope, if I remember correctly.
That's what I'm talking about.
It's not the genes, it's not even the corruptive nature of power, it is culture. European culture. The only way we started to begin to understand the error of our ways was to wage two catastrophic wars against each other that destroyed our continent to an unseen extent. Sadly, we exported that toxic element of our culture to another continent. Just look at recent elections.

And in regards to the whitewashing of this IP, well, Hollywood doesn't trust its audience to embrace a more colorful world. It's gotten better but it's still a long way to go. At least we're going there. I just wish we'd hurry up a bit. I'm still baffeled about that Airbender movie and how they fucked up casting that so badly.
I like Johansson but she makes as much sense in that role as a black James Bond. It one of the things that make me hope the movie is good despite of it.

Are you implying that white people are shitty to everyone else because they are white? Or is it less about skin color and more about how a dominant culture/race treats and mistreats others?
No matter which group is currently dominant, power always corrupts.

@Jinx
I'm not sure you could call this cultural misappropriation, I'm pretty sure GITS is owned by a Japanese company and sold the movie rights to Hollywood. And the credits will still feature the name of GITS's creator, Masamune Shirow, a Japanese man. So white people are not taking credit for something they didn't create.

People say they want to see more cultural diversity but they start throwing fits whenever someone uses a cultural element in their work and they themselves are not from that culture.
I see a world where older cultures are gradually going to mix together and become newer ones, this to me, is inevitable; and I look forward to the day where we can simply enjoy good works without all the moral hand wringing.

As for the trailer itself, I think it looks better than what little I've seen before. Although I am not sure I like some of the turns they are taking in the story that this trailer seems to imply. The first of her kind? I seem to recall there were lots of people like her in the mangas and the anime.

The actors really made the 5th Element special. Hopefully Gary Oldman is in this one.

Awesome. To me, only slightly reading between the lines, it sounds like he is suggesting exactly what I feel is the right track here.

Let Trump do whatever it is that he is going to do. If individual elements / components of his policy suggestions are good, help him with them. And if/when he suggests dangerous, counterproductive or bigoted things, call him out, dig in your heels, and do everything you can to raise awareness and stop him.

Let Trump dig his own grave trying to fulfill all of his contradictory promises to a large angry mob.

But in the meantime, don't obstruct good things simply because they came from the "wrong side". That has been the Republican modus operandi -- show the people there is a better way. Trump talked about rebuilding infrastructure in his victory speech. FDR's "New Deal" did a lot of that with the Tennessee Valley Authority and other projects. That created a LOT of jobs and helped pull the US out of the great depression. Any infrastructure / public works stuff that Trump pushes for that would actually have positive results while creating jobs? Sign off on that shit!

Trump's Wall could be a fulcrum point. Pointless and somewhat offensive in premise, but some good could come from trying to build it or even actually succeeding (which I find highly unlikely). I think the appropriate response to Trump's Wall for Democrat legislators would be to vocally point out that tax money would probably be better spent elsewhere, but otherwise playing along to a certain extent. That wall is going to be a big millstone around Trump's neck -- no need to work overly hard to help him try to wriggle out of it.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Definitely getting that 5th Element feel. Will see!

VS seems to be broken.

http://videosift.com/rss2/ant/member.xml shows

"XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://videosift.com/rss2/ant/member.xml
Line Number 1, Column 1:
^"

My adult self is impressed with the animation.

My inner 6-year-old is screaming "WANT WANT WANT! It must be mine!!!!". Unfortunately, he has access to my credit card (edit: holy fuck... it's FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS?!? Inner 6 year old will have to wait)

That really is a *quality set, it's just missing one crucial element.... the canteen.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Eddie-Izzard-and-the-Death-Star-Canteen-done-with-Legos

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.

I am not questioning your credentials, your intent or anything like that.

And I understand that what you are saying is logically the best course of action for any individual, that being the one that doesn't result in the person being in a body bag.

But unfortunately things tend to not change unless blood is spilled and lives are lost. It's moments like these that shock people out of their complacency. I don't need to tell you this of course, you understand it explicitly already (eg. mentioning Stonewall, for example). Black lives matter started out of this, and while I disagree ideologically with their methods of whitewashing (pun intended) the stats to ignore black deaths at the hands of black perpetrators, I think generally it has at least focused the spotlight back on what is essentially acceptable racism, ie. that any person with black skin is a ticking timebomb of crime and we should all feel justified in treating them that way... = \

But even if you take out the element of standing up against a bad system, there is still that frustration that causes a person to eventually say "Fuck it...". And yeah, I agree, it's far better personally to just eat shit and wait for daylight, but I understand why someone who makes all the right moves and still get's treated badly will finally push back, despite the possibility of tragic consequences.

@newtboy: Trumps appeal to the LCD is successful mostly because the LCD has been allowed to grow so much in our post-Regan society. With inequality on the rise and decades of trickle-down government-by-the-wealthy-for-the-wealthy, those "left behind" have been growing faster and faster every year.

It Trump fails to win this go around then the pendulum may keep swinging further. My concern is that the next 'protest' candidate will be even worse than he.

@ChaosEngine:

We'll have to agree to disagree about some things. For me, as bad as Trump is, I'm not convinced that he is worse than what Hillary was revealted to be by the DNC Leaks...

...but perhaps instead of arguing about which shit sandwich is worse, it is more productive to work together to find out why there are only shit sandwiches on the menu?

On this:

"But things will never change until you fix your broken political system. You're barely a democracy these days."

I am in complete agreement.

When I first heard of the Brexit vote, I thought it was some nasty xenophobic/racist group that had somehow managed to capture 51% of a nation. But could Britian really be that full of xenophobes? It was in a bit of casual research on the subject when I discovered that J. Pie video I referenced in my earlier comment. I had to revise my first assumption about the group that voted to leave the E.U.. While there may have been an element of xenophobia involved, it was economic factors that was the driving force behind the Brexit vote.

People who have been screwed over by years of government for corporations which has only worsened since Glass–Steagall was repealed by Bill Clinton. The hold the wealthy have on government was tightened after Citizen's United.

Much of the support Trump has been able to marshal is a reaction to years of governance-for-the-wealthy-by-the-wealthy.

Lawrence Lessig's does a better job unpacking this quagmire in his talk: "We The People: the Republic We Must Reclaim" which has far too few views on YT or votes on the sift, IMO. For anyone who's ever been unhappy with the political system in the past number of years, I consider it a must-watch.


Link here:

http://videosift.com/video/lawrence-lessig-2016-will-have-two-elections-TED-talk

@newtboy

I believe the quote you were looking for from me was:
What is more, upon the UN mandating a two state solution to the whole mess, the Jewish Palestinians immediately accepted. The Arab Palestinians though appealed to the Arab league, and many of the leaders within it that stood alongside the Nazi's pontificating solutions to 'the problem'.

The word stood being in the past tense. Guys like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, leading the fight in Palestine in the 30's and coming back to fight during 1948.

You said:
The few actual refugees there that the axis created were absorbable by the Palestinians.

In which time frame did those few refugees arrive that you would count legitimate and absorbable? IMO it has to predate the Grand Mufti's uprising in the late 1930s, simply because tensions between Jewish and Arab Palestinians at this point were bad enough that Arab Palestinians already wanted negative immigration numbers for Jews.

Also maybe re-read you last paragraph. You come dangerously close to stating that the European Jews had the choice between living in camps and doing what the folks led by Haj Amin al-Husseini told them to do, or being considered invaders themselves. That's about the closest we've come to agreeing on something in fact, and I hardly blame the refugees for not choosing camps under the rule of a guy that stated:
Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, and as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.

You are factually wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)

What to you count as "before" the war? Jewish population in Palestine at set times looks as below:

1890 had 43,000 making your 8%
1922 had 94,000 making 13.6%
1931, still before WW2 broke out in 39 had 175,000 making almost 17%

As for the nazi's being long gone by 1948, most obviously Hitler was still alive 3 years earlier which is hardly most people's idea of a long time. I'm afraid that even that is but the gentlest error in your statement. Palestinian tensions and revolts were ongoing in the 1930s already. Those tensions broke out into a full blown civil war in 1947.

Th 1970s two state UN mandate is obviously NOT the mandate accepted by Jewish palestinians in 1948. I can not fathom how you honestly make such a mistake? Plainly the UN Partition Plan for Palestine from 29 November 1947 as a proposed resolution to the civil war there is the mandate I meant. Given that it was a proposed resolution to a conflict that was simmering on and off throughout WW2 it hardly seems a conflict in which the Nazi's were "long gone".

Read up on Haj Amin al-Husseini, he led the Arab revolt in 1930's Palestine. He later bounced his way to Nazi germany and in 1941 declared
Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, and as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.

So no, I don't believe you can really honestly say that the Arab-Jewish tensions that led civil war in Palestine occurred in an environment were the Nazi's were a distant memory.

You weren't joking.

"Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as fully too rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be "out of control" can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts in the minds of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project to all adversaries."

That's the international political equivalent of acting crazy when someone tries to mug you. Give 'em the old crazy eyes.

Also, partly thanks to separate feeds for the two of them and being allowed time to fully answer, Chomsky was fantastic at dealing with Cathy Fucking Newman. The poster child for modern condescending journalism, with her "Ah, no one is surprised you're critical of the US...." --having listened to supporting facts for several minutes, she comes back with tongue-in-cheek-but-not-really insinuations about bias. Subtly and with plausible deniability, attacking the person not the argument.

It's good that this kind of discussion appears on TV at all, especially on a major British channel, but they get away with the same kind of shit that people lambaste RT for.

I'm supposed to be attending an Ayahuasca ceremony in a few weeks. I think the 'not quite pleasurable' element is why it's treated more as a ceremonial/religious/disciplinary practice, than a recreational experience, but people continue to use it due to the side-effects being beneficial in that way too (not many recreational drugs can 'reset' your mind to a healthier way of thinking the way Ayahuasca purportedly does).