#1 what DOESN'T cost money? I'll tell you what cost LESS money..video cameras. If I can't have a cop monitor an intersection 24/7, then I am fine with a red light camera.

#2 Well getting caught in your own traps is just your own problem. Has nothing to do with changing rules or slipper slopes. I think I understand what you mean by rules being added allowing the govt to add more rules un-opposed, but this MAINLY has to do with the publics becoming more lazy and not bothering themselves with politics, ie people not involving themselves with the rule making process anymore.

#3 CCTV Does it's job. It helps identify and catch spur of the moment crimes (Abuse, attacks, robbery) and at least causes planned crimes like drug trafficking to be moved elsewhere. You can't really STOP this with public CCTV coverage but at least you can prevent it from happening in front of your house or on the playground near the kids.

#4 While I think shatter went the extreme, I know what you mean. We have lots of old laws we break all the time now. This is not the CCTV's problem though. %99 of the time these laws are also ignore by the police, and we only find out about them when that %1 gets charged with one of those laws. This is just something else that needs to be fixed by the people and really has nothing to do with CCTV.

I understand people are afraid of loosing freedoms, but I also understand that we are not earning it either. Broken economy systems, failing healthcare, and lax education systems are causing chaos and hardship which leads to increased crime. If you want your freedoms back, you are going to have to become involved with politics more and make sure the right people are making your laws.

For the rest of you, here's some quotes from shinyblurry from another thread, just so you know where he's coming from.

----------------------------------

shinyblurry says...

Since you asked, I'll tell you why I believe in God. Up until 8 years ago I was agnostic. I was raised agnostic, without any religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but that was about it. I wasn't raised to like or dislike religion, I was simply left free to decide what I believed.

At the time I became a theist, I didn't believe in a spiritual reality, or any God I had ever heard of, because like most of the people here I saw no evidence for it at all. I actually used to go into christian chat rooms and debate christians on what I saw to be inconsistances in the bible. A lot of what people have said in this thread are thoughts that I once had and arguments I used to use myself.

Then one day it all changed. I guess you could say my third eye was opened. I had something akin to a kundalini awakening, spontaneously out of nowhere. When it was over, I could suddenly perceive the spiritual reality. I didn't quite know what I was looking at, at the time..didn't truly understand what had happened to me (though through intuition i understood the great potential of it). It was only after researching it online and finding out about the chakras did I start to understand.

It's an amazing, truly truly amazing thing to find out everything you know is wrong. It is really utterly mind blowing. This however, was the conclusion I was forced to immediately reach however, because the evidence for it was right in front of my face. Everything that I had known up until the point I could perceive the spiritual was missing so many essential elements that I may as well have been just born.

I started to receive signs..little miracles, I would call them..like stepping in front of a vast panarama of nature and suddenly seeing it at an angle impossible to human sight, where everything is in focus at the same time, that produced such startling beauty it filled me to overflowing with estatic joy. I started to perceive there was a higher beauty, a higher love that had always been there but I had somehow missed it. I started to get the point, that there was something more. That there was a God.

When I conceded it was possible, to myself, it was then that I started to hear from Him directly. He let me know a couple of things, and proved to me that I wasn't just imagining Him. He showed me that He had been there my entire life, teaching me and guiding me as a child on, only I had been totally unaware of it. He showed me how we "shared space", and that not only could He read my mind, but in some essential way that He was what my mind is. That He is mind itself. He showed me how my thought process was more of a cooperative than a solitary thing.

Now before you say I just jumped at all of this because everyone wants to imagine a loving God, etc etc..untrue in my case. When I first found out He was definitely real, i was scared shitless. Up until that point, my thoughts about God were all negative. I figured if He did exist He probably hated me. You see, that is what I had gleaned growing up in a Christian society without actually knowing anything about it.

At this point I became a theist. I thought of God as a He because He seemed masculine rather than feminine, and also I thought of Him as the Creator. I didn't know anything about the bible, or the Holy Trinity, or what a messiah was, or any of that. I thought the God I knew must not be generally known because I had never seen anything out there that pointed to a loving God.

For the next 6 yeears I was on a spiritual journey. I studied all the various belief systems, spiritual or otherwise, all the religious history..east and west, north and south. I studied philosophy and esoteric wisdom, gurus and prophets. The one I really hadn't studied though, was Christianity. The reason being I didn't believe Jesus actually ever existed so I dismissed it out of hand.

Before I knew anything about Christianity, God taught me three important things about who He is. One, He taught me His nature is triune, that God is three. I didn't understand what that meant precisely, I just knew that was His nature. He also taught me that there was a Messiah. He taught me that there was someone whose job it was to save the world. The third thing and most important thing He taught me was about His love. That He loved everyone, and that He secretly took care of them whether they believed in Him or not. He showed me His perfect heart.

What led me to the bible was this: I asked Him who the Messiah was and He told me to look in a mirror. At the time I had been away from civilization for a few months and my beard had grown out for the first time in my life. I hadn't seen a mirror since I was clean shaven. I sought one out and when I saw my reflection I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked *exactly* like Jesus Christ. I mean to a T.

It was then I was forced to accept the possibility that Jesus was real. To be honest, I really didn't want to. I felt like I had a really special relationship with the Father and that Jesus could only get in the way of that. I didn't even feel like I could pay Him any real respect, because I knew the Father was greater than He was. But, I couldn't ignore what He was showing me, so I started to read the bible. To my surprise, I found out it was about the God I already knew.

Everything I read in the bible matched what I already knew about God . The Holy Trinity matched His triune nature. That there was a Messiah and Jesus was it. And most of all His love, His great and majestic love, for all people, was perfectly laid out in ways I had never before comprehended. The bible was the only information on Earth that accurately described what I already knew about God. That is how I knew it was true from the outset.

So that's when I became a Christian. I couldn't ignore the evidence. My journey to Christianity was based on rationality and logic, believe it or not, albiet with miracles and spirituality mixed in. Even the miracles themselves were logical, as God showed me how He worked from a meta-perspective, and that time and space didn't restrict Him at all. So there you have it..an interesting testimony to be sure.

I am unusual in that I didn't come to God on my own. God chose me, I didn't choose Him. I might never have come to God if He hadn't. I found out later that this means I was elected..in that, before God made the world He had already planned to create me to do His will. After He woke me up it never really took much faith to believe in God because He demonstrated to me His amazing power and ASTONISHING intellect in ways that were impossible to refute. Whatever brick wall I would put up, He would smash it down into oblivion. He favored me because I stayed hungry. I knew the truth was knowable, and I gunned for it 200 percent. I would have died for it.

So I empathize with the people here. Some of you might actually be elected too, it just is not your time to know. Some are probably angry/scared/rebelliious, while still others are intellectually incurious and swayed by hyperbole. I'm pretty sure not many people here have actually read the bible. I hadn't either..I was simply arrogant at the time.

So what I would say to people here is..there is far more going on than seems apparent..if you don't believe at least that there is a spiritual reality, you're practically rubbing two sticks together. God definitely exists and will prove it to you if you humble yourself, come to Him in sincerity, with your total heart and pray. Admit you're a sinner, and ask Him to be your Lord and Savior. Anyone can know God is real. I wish I had read it earlier..would have saved me a hardship. Save yourself the trouble and find out the truth for yourself, that God is real He loves you. God bless..

-------------------------------------

People, people, people. Walmart is not the REASON the entire civilised world is finding itself in this situation - walmart is a symptom of the problem.

Walmart is an organisation motivated by profit just like any other.

I heard energy companies posting record profits year in and year out before the recession. There's people at the upper ends of those kinds of companies taking wages, bonuses, pensions and god-knows-what that some people couldn't make in 10 years. They don't deserve it, they don't work 10 times harder then the next person down, but there is a culture of taking what you can.

People don't need that kind of wealth, they just want it. Now, in times of hardship, energy companies are demanding more money for their services because they are no longer making the profit they used to. Instead of relying on the wealth that they have amassed during times of good, they rely on us to give them more.

So they cut a load of jobs to maximise their profits, but now the people they fired can't afford their energy bills. And this is going on all over the place - it isn't just the energy companies, it's also walmart with whatever schemes they've got. It's the oil companies and the politicians with whatever schemes they've got.

And all these schemes intermix, people losing jobs, people unable to afford this here and there because we've stagnated our money, there was no trickle down wealth, it's stagnated so much that there's not enough available anymore to share between the people that need it.

So now the government starts giving out handouts to the elderly or unemployed - £300 for your winter heating bill. But that's a huge amount of money so we need to raise taxes - which is a solution to nothing but puts the problem further ahead and maybe you can work harder later to make up for it.

Meanwhile, half the jobs that are getting taxed are now moved abroad because production is cheaper there. So entire markets of jobs no longer exist, we lost all of our car manufacturers, coal mines (it's cheaper from china), etc. which amounts to millions of jobs, and there's not a lot left to tax. What's the solution now? Which country do we bail out with borrowed money that is earning interest? If the untold billions in profit was returned to the customers back when times were good, we wouldn't be in this situation. But instead it went towards making let's say 30 individual people a lot richer.

Do you see where i'm going with this? It's a culture of greed, and each point down the line there is just enough intentional maneuverability for people to take more than you deserve and/or need; you either are in the clique, in the power scheme, taking cash - or you're not and you're holding up the facade. This isn't what a society is meant to be - it's meant to be a group of people working for their own common benefit because when we don't we all suffer and no one is happy.

This model has a short life-cycle; the eventual result is a few people having a lot of little bits of green paper that don't mean anything because they've forced everyone into abject poverty.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in."
It doesn't get any simpler than that. Until these old men start planting some trees and giving a LOT back, we will stagnate and you don't want to learn this implied lesson the hard way.

In all honesty, what is the hardship in the current state of registration?

I find this topic to be horribly ridiculous. You wasted peoples time Fisk. You wasted time.


Smack yourself sir. hard.

>> ^bobknight33:

Some of the most stupid reason to vote for Obama.
Obama has 1/2 Asian sister - so vote Obama.
Obama has 3 Asians working for him - so vote Obama.
I was interned in the 40s - so vote Obama.
Asians have low voter turn out - so vote Obama.


He's making the case to Asian Americans that Obama cares about and understands their interests. Obama's cabinet appointments, family and upbringing help make that point. As for low voter turn out among Asian Americans, I think Takei is making a more general point that their community has gone through hardship and discrimination to get where they are now, and it's a waste if the younger generation doesn't choose to participate in democracy.

@hpqp
Good points, all.
However, the "cognition is sacred" (as opposed to "human life is sacred") viewpoint has a hole in it about the size of human consciousness. (Oh man, tangent time!) Some loudly proclaim the presence of a divine soul or spirit, but there is certainly something else there, aside from the physical form.
Obviously, human (and for that matter animal) experience and behavior is influenced by the physical brain and its processes. Damage to it predictably and reproducibly changes behavior and perception. As much as some of us would like to think otherwise, the physical structure and function of the brain influences who we are and what we do as individuals. I would honestly have no problem accepting that the physical universe as we've modeled it functions precisely as it has, autonomously. (Right down to fruitless debates between individuals on the Internet.) Evolution is a real thing. The brain has developed as yet another beneficial mutation that promotes the propagation of its host organism. Input in, behavior out, feedback loop. Click click click, ding.
But the problem is that we experience this. Somehow this mass of individual cells (and below that individual molecules, atoms, quarks) experiences itself in a unified manner, or rather something experiences this mass of matter in a unified manner. No matter how far down you track it, there's no physical accommodation for consciousness. To give a specific example, the cells in the eye detect light (intensity and wavelength) by electrochemical stimulation. The binary "yes\no" of stimulation is routed through the thalamus in individual axons, physically separated in space, to the visual cortex, where it's propagated and multiplied through a matrix of connections, but all individual cells, and all just ticking on and off based on chemical and electrical thresholds. The visual field is essentially painted as a physical map across a region of the brain, but somehow, the entire image is experienced at once. Cognition is necessarily distinct from consciousness.

What this means, practically, is that we must attribute value to cognition and consciousness separately.
Cognition may not be completely understood, but we can explain it in increasingly specific terms, and it seems that we'll be able to unravel how the brain works within the current model. It absolutely has a value. We consider a person who is "a vegetable" to have little to no current or expected quality of life, and generally are comfortable making the decision to "pull the plug".
Consciousness, however, is what we believe makes us special in the universe, despite being completely empty from a theoretical standpoint. If sensory input, memory, and behavioral responses are strictly a function of the material, then stripped of those our "unified experience" is completely undetectable\untestable. We have no way of knowing if our neighbor is a meaty automaton or a conscious being, but we assume. Which is precisely why it's special. It's obviously extra-physical. Perhaps @gorillaman's tomatobaby (that is, the newborn which he says is without Mind) has a consciousness, but it isn't obvious because the physical structure is insufficient for meaningful manifestation. I have difficulty accepting that consciousness, empty though it is on its own, is without value. "So what," though, right? If you can't detect it in anyone but yourself, what use is it in this discussion? Clearly, there IS something about the structure or function of the brain that's conducive to consciousness. We are only conscious of what the brain is conscious of and what it has conceived of within its bounds. So the brain at least is important, but it's not the whole point.
Anyway, there's that tangent.

The "stream of potential life" argument has its limits. Any given sperm or egg is exceedingly unlikely to develop into a human. For a single fertilized egg, the odds shift dramatically. That's why people seek abortions, because if they don't do something, they're probably going to have a baby. The probability of "brewin' a human" is pretty good once you're actually pregnant. The "potential for human life" is very high, which is why you can even make the quality of life argument.

Obviously, you realize how those on the anti-abortion side of the debate react when someone who is...let's say abortion-tolerant ("pro-abortion" overstates it for just about anyone, I suspect) says that they're considering the "quality of life" of the prospective child in their calculus. They get this mental image: "Your mother and I think you'll both be better off this way, trust me. *sound of a meatball in a blender*"
I appreciate that we're trying to minimize suffering in the world and promote goodness, but I think it's over-reaching to paint every potential abortion (or even most) as a tragic tale of suffering simply because the parent wasn't expecting parenthood. Quality of life is much more nuanced. Many wonderful humans have risen from squalor and suffering and will tell you earnestly they believe that background made them stronger\wiser\more empathetic\special. Many parents who were devastated to learn they were pregnant love their unexpected children. And holy crap, kids with Downs, man. What's the quality of life for them and their parents? Terribly challenging and terribly rewarding.
No, I'm not trying to paint rainbows over economic hardship and child abuse and say that "everything's going to be finnnnneeee", but quality of life is a personal decision and it's unpredictable. Isn't that what "It Gets Better" is all about? "Things may seem grim and terrible now, but don't kill yourself just yet, you're going to miss out on some awesome stuff."

Hrm. Thus far we've really been framing abortion as being about "unready" parents, probably because the discussion started on the "mother can choose to have sex" angle.
You've got to wonder how confused this issue would get if we could detect genetically if a fetus might be homosexual. Would Christians loosen their intolerance for abortion if it meant not having a "gay baby"? (Even if it would fly in the face of their belief that homosexuality is a choice.) Would pro-choicer's take a second look at the availability of abortion? Would it still be "one of those terrible things that happens in a free society"?

On western aid, you're spot on. It's so easy to throw money at a problem and pretend we're helping. Humanitarian aid does nothing if we're not promoting and facilitating self-sufficiency. Some people just need a little help getting by until they're back on their feet, but some communities need a jump-start. As you say, they need practical education. I've only been on handful of humanitarian missions myself, so I give more financially than I do of my sweat, but I'm careful to evaluate HOW the organizations I give to use the funds. Are they just shipping food or are they teaching people how to live for themselves and providing the resources to get started? Sure, some giving is necessary. It's impossible for someone to think about sustainable farming and simple industry if they're dying from cholera or starving to death.

@renatojj The distinction between no and bad choice or even good choice depends on the point of view and in that regard I agree with you, it is arbitrary in both directions. I argue that 0 or 1 choice (good or bad) = no choice. I argue that sometimes even more choices are no choice. Would the ability to vote for 3 presidential candidates be no choice, a choice or multiple choices if all 3 are extreme right and there is no other option? I argue that 3 x extreme right = same choice = 1 choice = no choice. Without any good choices, if all options are bad, there really isnt any choice, even if there are many bad choices. If employers were to offer 1 euro per hour in Spain to those unemployed, that is below the minimum required to live. You can say that is a good choice in economical terms as it is more than 0, but I doubt the employees would agree. It is the same as not offering salary so again not an option. Now the question is which viewpoint should you take? I would say the idea is to protect the less powerful against the more powerful and maximize the total amount of choices for the total group.

There is something interesting to note here: Where government makes laws protecting employees from certain hardships (against unfair dismissal, discrimination, too low pay etc) arguable limiting the choices of employers, it also makes laws that limit the employees (for instance setting higher pension ages.)

"When will that someone or a group ever be satisfied with their choices if we give them the choice of removing the choices of others forcefully? "
Exactly! In a world where the powerful can set their own rules with no one there to stop them, what incentive have they to do the right thing? That is exactly what we have seen go wrong time and again in fully free markets. There are so many examples of this. You believe government is the one removing choice? Look at monopoly markets and see what happens to prices there.
You believe government only sets rules one way, always against a group. That is not the case. The idea is that policy makers try to find a middle ground between the freedom of one group vs the freedom of another group. That is a fine line to walk and continually needs to be adjusted but it is a much more ethical line than simply giving a group with power full control in the hope that they will do well because of "the market".

"If you mess with the incentives for people to get out of their own undesirable situations, people end up imposing their costs on those who instead made an effort of having more choices, thus establishing a moral hazard (good being punished, evil being rewarded)."

Do you have an example? Maybe I am missing your point. In my mind, its not about the incentives as all people always want to improve themselves. Its about the amount of choices they can have. If you leave it to a part of the people who have reason to take control and coerce another group, they will.

"It's easy to see any economic problem being directly solved with laws, but not so easy to see the consequences. Even worse, the moral hazard leads to people misbehaving, and that ends up being invariably blamed on the concept of a free market, specially where there is no actual free market to speak of, like when you talk about Spain."

Spain is not a free market? In what way?

About the charity: No I dont think charity is pointless You cant compare charity to employment because in employment there is an exchange, hours work for pay, which creates mutual dependence and a relationship. In the case of charity there is none. Though the person in the unfortunate situation may depend on charity, he or she is not giving anything in return. Without this exchange, there is no relationship between giver and taker, which means no power over anything as there is no economic reason to give. If the giver demanded something for it, it is pay and not charity and a true mutual dependence with possible coercion would appear.

Judge a person by the time in which they live in. We are not all hunter gathers this day, nor should those that have never known another period of time be outright expected to base their preferences on the inexperience of past hardships.

Learning from the past isn't the same as living in it.

It's called progression, advancement, betterment. Unfortunately, there's also those that get so much further ahead they gain the ability to put hash pressures down on others that they wouldn't otherwise want put down on themselves if positions were reversed.

Hadn't heard of this guy previously, i miss the past. (also he speaks with this off tone that seems it's meant to be soft and knowledgeable.. but what i really got was an odd feeling this guy was grooming me. Go away Mr Touchy)

>> ^zombieater:

So, basically his idea is that these people don't know actual work or hardship and that these poor humble corporations (as if they're actual people) are the saviors of our modern world. What bullshit.
Here is my response.
Even if you work one or two jobs, it wont make much of a difference because workers' wages are at an all time low and corporate profits are at an all time high. That destroys his "work hard and win" argument right there for the majority of Americans.
Since 1980, corporations have started to take their profits and reinvest them and buy out competition instead of increasing the pay for their workers (that's in the link too). Basically, screw over the working class and benefit the upper class.


Apparently in order to protest in this country we have to actually become a third world police state. I say we protest BEFORE that happens.

Anyone ever exposed to babies know they are natures worst STD, tee hee.



I like Christopher Langan idea, of a "from birth" birth control, so that ALL pregnancies are a rational decision rather than by lust. Many of the worlds problems wouldn't be such a big deal if there weren't so many of us. We create a lot of hardship in providing for people by having more people tomorrow than we did today.

edit: ( I have always loved the word "Jesuit", there is just something smooth about the way that it is said, one of my favorite words, as it discombobulated)

>> ^longde:

If the guy wants justice, why not file charges against the woman? He has gobs of evidence. Throwing someone to the mob isn't justice.


This would have been a really dumb video if he just had the car parked sideways in the street, because we'd all assume it was just some entitled piece of shit that felt they could do as they please. Even if they could have identified her or he if posted her info and said that was her car......people wouldn't have reacted.

They basically came out and confirmed that they were entitled pieces of shit, removing any and all doubt. She and her husband threatened the guy, after obviously violating traffic laws doing something most people would never consider doing.

The guy on the receiving end of their threats is not "throwing them to the mob" by posting the evidence of those threats in a public forum. If people react extremely to evidence of those actions, it's not the victims fault.

This falls under the "all choices have consequences, known and unknown" category. Lady could have let the authorities tow her car, never exposing her identity to the guy filming the vehicle......paid the fines and guy would probably have never identified her. She could have just driven off and decided that parking across the street blocking traffic flow probably wasn't a very smart thing to do. But she got out and confronted the guy, like HE was doing something wrong.

While this is not as severe a crime, it's akin to blaming the rape victim for pointing a finger at the rapist after they've gotten their evidence.....because the rapist might suffer hardship for being identified and all the evidence confirms he did it. The video tape, assuming it's not doctored leaves no doubt as to what the crimes being committed were, by whom, and how far they were willing to go to keep their accuser quiet (at least on video, who knows what they did to him before, after, or will do).

It's really not anyone's job to help people hide their bad behavior from the public eye, whether it's illegal or not.

>> ^sadicious:

>> ^westy:
couple of issues with this
1) FUCKING CALL THE POLICE OR SUMONE FIRST BEFORE FILMING ( might have done this anyway )
2) IF FILMING KEEP THE ACTION IN FRAME
3) THE OTHER CAR COULD VEER RIGHT OR LEFT DONT DRIVE INLINE WITH IT YOU RETARDS
also it dosent matter that the people find it funny, finding something funny does not mean that you wont be pragmatic, productive or have empathy with people involved and consequences.

1. What if they don't have a cell phone with them?
2. You didn't pay him to keep it in frame. Infact, you didn't pay him at all!
3. How else do they attempt to keep the action in frame?
3b. Humor is often connected with hardship. They came to the conclusion that the driver was doing it intentionally. One of them mentioned that they wanted to see what would happen at a bridge. This isn't so they could see a bloody mess, but so they could see some more action with the drivers off-road skills. I doubt anyone in the car filming wanted to see this person kill or be killed. If only they read the newspaper from tomorrow, they may of acted better.


you didn't comprehend what I wrote granted I write like a retard but other people understood what I put

1) thats obvouse why would you make that piont bvously that logic is self containd in what i said , its also likely they r filming it on a phone in the first place as that's the most likely video camara people would have to hand in this situation ( WHAT IF THEY WERE ALL DEFF !!!! WHAT IF THEY HAD NO BATTERIES , WHAT IF THEY ALL HAD ERECTIONS THAT WAS BLOCKING THERE HANDS FROM POCKETS )

2) why does it matter if I paid them if you are going to go to the effort to film something should at least try and do a good job of it evan if its for themselfs

3) well what you do is you work out that you are moving around allot so you keep the shot zoomed out you then angle yourself as such so that the subject is kept in frame , the driver would also stay behind the car so that if it did veer off he would have time to react and this would allso let the guy filming film clearly people watch tv they should know these things from police chases film sequences and by generally thinking.


3b) you didn't understand what I said

>> ^westy:

couple of issues with this
1) FUCKING CALL THE POLICE OR SUMONE FIRST BEFORE FILMING ( might have done this anyway )
2) IF FILMING KEEP THE ACTION IN FRAME
3) THE OTHER CAR COULD VEER RIGHT OR LEFT DONT DRIVE INLINE WITH IT YOU RETARDS
also it dosent matter that the people find it funny, finding something funny does not mean that you wont be pragmatic, productive or have empathy with people involved and consequences.


1. What if they don't have a cell phone with them?
2. You didn't pay him to keep it in frame. Infact, you didn't pay him at all!
3. How else do they attempt to keep the action in frame?
3b. Humor is often connected with hardship. They came to the conclusion that the driver was doing it intentionally. One of them mentioned that they wanted to see what would happen at a bridge. This isn't so they could see a bloody mess, but so they could see some more action with the drivers off-road skills. I doubt anyone in the car filming wanted to see this person kill or be killed. If only they read the newspaper from tomorrow, they may of acted better.

I thought he was funny. People complain that he wasn't insulting enough but given the range of people that were presenting he'd be a bit hard pressed to insult half of them cos they're the nice end of the hollywood spectrum - banderas, portman, etc. they're hardly flamboyant or selfish or anything. Got a few really good insults in, made a fool out of depp and depp loved it, got elton thank god, and a REALLY good insult about the lavishness of the affair during a recession which for me made this the best speech of all he's done; great statement from a man who has enough money to pay no attention to the hardships of a recession.

Just look at that miserable fat fucking flamboyant diva cunt elton john. Miserable twat, i felt my soul start to drain as soon as the camera centred on his jowly podgy churchill cheeks. He's like a fat, old, ugly, slightly camp dementor sucking up the joy everywhere he goes and depositing misery in its place. I've never seen an old man throw a temper tantrum like a 6 year old girl until him. Cos that's what he is. Old. And a D-list celebrity.

Sorry.

Excellent post. Remember also that 10%-30% of the (world?) population are sociopaths completely incapable of empathy.

>> ^kceaton1:

I usually assume most of humanity is full of many people that are incapable of compassion and more importantly empathy. Not only does it explain why women date assholes (most people are anyway, to some degree--unless as stated they have empathy), but also why women might also be "bitches" (or assholes). Simply put nobody gives a fuck about anybody else's feelings, really, unless their action can create direct repercussions that affect them or something they do care about. Empathy, unfortunately, seems to be learned by most people the hard way (and this of course affects the entirety of the "Human Experience", not just relationships): you get a very painful disease/syndrome/ailment/injury and have to LIVE with it. People just do not have high level empathy unless terrible things have happened to them (I'm sure there is the few exceptions).
Basically, women will date assholes because the majority of the population are. Men that are the stereotypical built-up, juiced, arrogant, confident, and usually ignorant bull-pup are what we are thinking about in these scenarios. Most of them, on their worse day, had a broken finger or did poorly in school. They lack the empathy needed to NOT be an asshole. It has nothing to do with anything else. Assholes are simply people that don't understand, people!
As I said age is most likely going to change that as they become withered and old. As they get diseases or finally have their genetic misfires take hold, like MS, Cancer, or AIDS. Or deal with their Type II Diabetes that forces them to eventually go in for dialysis and even later the removal of limbs to stave the finality of its ultimate toll on their life. Or those that can no longer pass the duty of hardships onto others, and must help their mother as she slowly dies with much needed around the clock help--requiring baths, medicine, feeding, clothing, 24/7 diligence--due to their degenerative "syndrome/disease" that will ultimately kill them and irrevocably change their son or daughter forever.
That is how empathy is gained and it is also how assholes become good members of the community. It's also the best way not to marry, date, or be in a relationship with one. Merely find out if they have had hardships in their life that have directly affected them (not others around them, it MUST happen to them). Ask them some simple questions, like: what has that event taught them about others and how did they think beforehand? If they can give you a solid answer--they are not an asshole.
Case closed.