, I said it was more controversial.

I dare say even agreeing that we don't solely choose our sexual interests, when it comes to our actions I insist we treat those as the result of free will, aka choice.

When I'm not typing from a 4in screen I can pull up the references, but the peer reviewed studies on genetics hardly illustrate that sexual orientation and identity are dominated by it. Twins studies do show that identical twins more often share orientation than non-identical, which gives a correlation to genetics. However, I'll pull up the studies but last I reviewed them, more than half the identical twins in the studies did NOT share the same orientation. That is an arguably compelling indicator that genetics does not solely determine orientation.

Other twin studies comparing other behaviours like religion show a similar pattern. Studies with twins on violent and aggressive behaviour show an even stronger "genetic" component than the orientation studies, and nobody has any qualms about being politically incorrect declaring that violence is a choice and not a birth attribute...

Animation?

This video has nothing to do with animation.
The fact that they used an automated service to illustrate as they talked doesn't make this animation.

I move to remove from animation. But that's up to @b4rringt0n

I didn't dismiss it. I stated what he provided and implied it was inadequate.

I literally just wrote that there are opposing papers. I hope you don't think putting opposing papers up is some sort of "gotcha" moment.

"Are you calling them liars?"

No. Are you calling the authors of the papers I've put up liars? I'm sure you can see how silly a question that is now it's put back at you.

"We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%"

I haven't been talking about suicide - but if you must then yes, it dropped the suicide by firearm rate. I never contended otherwise.

"The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise [somewhere between 35% and 50%]"

43% variance is large. The reality is the data isn't very good (as multiple studies have pointed out) and it makes it very hard to measure, analyse, and draw appropriate conclusions.

"NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved."

Note the language, "seems to have". They aren't affirming that it has because they probably can't back it up with solid data.

"The NFA also seems to have reduced firearm homicide outside of mass shootings"

Again, non-concrete affirmations. The same data sets as analysed by multiple other studies points to no change in the rate. Are any of them liars? I doubt it.

I believe the McPhedron paper is one of the most important, illustrating that some of the key legislative changes had no effect when comparing it to our closest cultural neighbour who didn't legislate the same changes (and maintained a lower overall average homicide rate and lower average homicide by firearm rate for the last 20 years).

As I already wrote, it's a contentious issue and there are opposing papers on this topic.

Sad video for sure (the music was a bit much though).

Kind of a tough call - I do think the truck driver deserves the majority of the blame and should at the minimum be charged with a hit and run - and probably more - as he did pass the cyclist and clearly did not proceed with any due caution on that turn.

With that said, as an avid cyclist myself, I trust NO ONE while riding. Looking at the video, there seems to be a bike lane symbol in the middle lane, suggesting that cyclists proceeding through the intersection should be using that lane. Now I don't think that is enforced by law, but if that is what the symbol is there for, this would be a perfect illustration as to why. Also, if you look even closer, it appears the truck had his indicator on before she pulled up beside him; i.e. she should have seen his indicator. I hate to put any blame on that poor woman and - I really hate to say this - this video only goes to show that both parties were at fault.

One number to illustrate how harsh the Soviet prisoners were treated: official records say more than 4000 Soviet prisoners died at the Stalag 3B in what is now Eisenhüttenstadt, compared to "only" 128 non-Soviet prisoners.

*promote

"sensitivity is more important than truth,
feelings are more important than facts"

Bill, the fact that you think those are "feminine" values illustrates exactly why feminism is still important.

Bill Burr continues to be an unfunnny throwback to the 80s and frankly, I wish he'd just fuck off.

Louis CK, OTOH, is still a comedic genius.

But here's the thing people. Comedians are great at comedy, but they're comedians, not philosophers or sociologists.

Comedy just doesn't really work with nuanced issues. There are tonnes of jokes about Trump because he's such an obvious combination of dickhead and idiot; there really isn't anything complex about him.

But you don't see much comedy about free trade vs. anti-globalisation because it's a fucking complicated issue that has pros and cons on both sides. Comedy is about hyperbole and exaggeration.

I don't know, but I've seen it before in other demonstrations or illustrations so they must have had good gloves . I figure that the blade was probably only kept sharp at the tip.

from wiki on the ineffectiveness of cutting slashes against full plate:
"To overcome this problem, swords began to be used primarily for thrusting. The weapon was used in the half-sword, with one or both hands on the blade. This increased the accuracy and strength of thrusts and provided more leverage for Ringen am Schwert or "wrestling at/with the sword". This technique combines the use of the sword with wrestling, providing opportunities to trip, disarm, break, or throw an opponent and place them in a less offensively and defensively capable position. During half-swording, the entirety of the sword works as a weapon, including the pommel and crossguard. One example how a sword can be used this way is to thrust the tip of the crossguard at the opponent's head right after parrying a stroke. Another technique would be the Mordstreich (lit. "murder stroke"), where the weapon is held by the blade (hilt, pommel and crossguard serving as an improvised hammer head) and swung, taking advantage of the balance being close to the hilt to increase the concussive effect."

As a former employee under both Jobs and Cook, I can tell you exactly what is wrong with Apple.

When I started with Apple, every thing we were concerned with was innovating. What could we come up with next? Sure, there were plenty of misses, but when we hit, we hit big. It was ingrained in the culture of the company. Managers wanted creative people, people who might not have been the best worker bee, but that could come up with new concepts easily. Sometimes corporate rules were broken, but if you could show that you were actively working towards something new, then you were OK.

Fast forward to when Cook started running the show, Steve was still alive, but had taken a backseat really. Metrics became a thing. Performance became a watchword. Managers didn't want creative thought, they wanted people who would put their nose to the grindstone and only work on things that headquarters suggested. Apple was no longer worried about innovating, they were concerned with 'maintaining'.

Two examples which might help illustrate further:

1. One of the guys I was working with was constantly screwing around in any free moment with iMovie. He was annoyed at how slow it was in rendering, which at the time was done on the CPU power. Did some of his regular work suffer, yeah. But he was praised because his concepts helped to shift some of the processing to the GPU and allow real time effects. This functionality made iMovie HD 6 amazing to work with.

2. In a different section of the company, the support side, a new manager improved call times, customer service stats, customer satisfaction, and drastically cut down on escalations. However, his team was considered to be:

a. making the other teams look bad

and

b. abusing the use of customer satisfaction tools, like giving a free iPod shuffle (which literally costs a few dollars to make) to extremely upset customers.

Now they were allowed to do all of these things, no rules were being broken. But Cook was mostly in charge by that point and he was more concerned with every damn penny. So, soon after this team blew all the other teams away for the 3rd month in a row, the new manager was demoted and the team was broken up, to be integrated into other teams willy-nilly.

Doing smart things was no longer the 'thing'. Toeing the line was. Until that changes, nothing is going to get better for Apple. I know I personally left due to stress and health issues from the extreme pressure that Cook kept sending downstream on us worker bees. My job, which I had loved, literally destroyed my health over a year.

Freedom of religion is independent of civilian armament.
History shows that religious persecution is normal for humanity, and in most cases it's perpetrated by the government. Sometimes to consolidate power (with government tie-ins to the main religion), and sometimes to pander to the grimace of a majority.

Ironically, in this country, freedom of religion only exists due to armed conflict, albeit merely as a side effect of independence from a religiously homogeneous ruling power.



It's true that Catalonians would likely have been shot at if they were armed.
However, likewise, the Spanish government will never grant the Catalans democracy so long as the Catalans are not armed - simply because it doesn't have to.
(*Barring self suicidal/sacrificial behavior on part of the Catalans that eventually [after much suffering] embarrasses the government into compliance - often under risk that 3rd parties will intervene if things continue)

When the government manufactures consent, it will be first in line to claim that people have democratic freedom. When the government fails to manufacture consent, it will crack down with force.

At the end of the day, in government, might makes right. Laws are only words on paper, the government's arms are what make the laws matter.

Likewise, democracy is no more than an idea. The people's force of arms (or threat thereof) is what assert's the people's dominance over the government.



You can say the police/military are stronger and it would never matter, however, the size of an [armed] population is orders of magnitude larger than the size of an army. Factor in the fact that the people need to cooperate with the government in order to support and supply the government's military. No government can withstand armed resistance of the population at large. This is one of the main lessons from The Prince.

Civilian armament is a bulwark against potentially colossal ills (albeit ills that come once every few generations).

Look at NK. The people get TV, radio, cell, from SK. They can look across the river and see massive cities on the Chinese side. They know they have to play along with the charade that their government demands. At the end of the day, without guns, things won't change.

Look at what happened during the Arab Spring. All these unarmed nations turned to external armed groups to fight for them to change their governments. All it accomplished was them becoming serfs to the invited 3rd parties. This is another lesson from The Prince : always take power by your own means, never rely on auxiliaries, because your auxiliaries will become your new rulers.






Below is general pontification. No longer a reply.
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Civilian armament does come with periodic tragedies. Those tragedies suck. But they're also much less significant than the risks of disarmament.
(Eg. School shootings, 7-11 robberies, etc -versus- Tamils vs Sri Lankan government, Rohingya vs Burmese government. etc.)

Regarding rifles specifically (all varieties combined), there is no point in arguing magnitudes (Around 400 lives per year - albeit taken in newsworthy large chunks). 'Falling out of bed' kills more people, same is true for 'Slip and fall'. No one fears their bed or a wet floor.

Pistols could go away and not matter much.
They have minimal militia utility, and they represent almost the entirety of firearms used in violent crime. (Albeit used to take lives in a non newsworthy 1 at a time manner)

(In the U.S.) If tragedy was the only way to die (otherwise infinite lifespan), you would live on average 9000 years. Guns, car crashes, drownings, etc. ~All tragedies included. (http://service.prerender.io/http://polstats.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/life#!/life)






A computer learning example I was taught:

Boy walking with his mom&dad down a path.
Lion #1 jumps out, eats his dad.
(Data : Specifically lion #1 eats his father.)
The boy and mom keep walking
Lion #2 jumps out, eats his mother.
(Data : Specifically lion #2 eats his mother)
The boy keeps walking
He comes across Lion #3.

Question : Should he be worried?

If you are going to generalize [the first two] lions and people, then yes, he should be worried.

In reality, lions may be very unlikely to eat people (versus say, a gazelle). But if you generalized from the prior two events, you will think they are dangerous.

(The relevance to computer learning is that : Computers learn racism, too. If you include racial data along with other data in a learning algorithm, that algorithm can and will be able to make decisions based on race. Not because the software cares - but because it can analyze and correlate.)

(Note : This is also why arguing religion is likely futile. If a child is raised being told that everything is as it is because God did it, then that becomes their basis for reality. Telling them that their belief in god is wrong, is like telling the boy in the example that lions are statistically quite safe to people. It challenges what they've learned.)



I mentioned this example, because it illustrates learning and perception. And it segways into my following analogy.



Here's a weird analogy, but it goes like this :

(I'm sure SJW minded people will shit themselves over it, but whatever)

"Gun ownership in today's urban society" is like "Black people in 80's white bred society".

2/3 of the population today has no contact with firearms (mostly urban folk)
They only see them on movies used to shoot people, and on the news used to shoot people.
If you are part of that 2/3, you see guns as murder tools.
If you are part of the remaining 1/3, you see guns like shoes or telephones - absolutely mundane daily items that harm nobody.

In the 80's, if you were in a white bred community, your only understanding of black people would be from movies where they are gangsters and shoot people, and from the nightly news where you heard about some black person who shot people.
If you were part of an 80's white bred community, you saw black people as dangerous likely killers.
If you were part of an 80's black/mixed community, you saw black people as regular people living the same mundane lives as anyone else.

In either case, you can analytically know better. But your gut feelings come from your experience.



Basically, I know guns look bad to 2/3 of the population. That won't change. People's beliefs are what they are.
I also know that the likelihood of being in a shooting is essentially zero.
I also know that history repeats itself, and -just in case- I'd rather live in an armed society than an unarmed society. Even if I don't carry a gun.

-scheherazade

The deeply conservative (!) "Die Welt" in Germany has two pieces by Sy Hersh, completely debunking the supposed chemical attack by the Syrians at Khan Sheikhoun. It also paints a highly disturbing picture of the decision-making process in both the White House and the Pentagon.

The first one is a rather short conversation that includes all the goodies: the chemical attack in Syria was, once again, not a chemical attack by Syrian forces -- they hit a stash, just like both the Syrians and the Russians claimed at the time.

The piece also details that US forces are keenly aware that it was not a chemical attack, that the response (Tomahawk strike on Syrian airfield) was equally ridiculous and dangerous, and that the bellicose stance of the US vis-a-vis Russia is complete lunacy.

The longer piece by Hersh himself and displays in great details the disconnect between Trump and his military advisers, as well as between the upper echelons of the military and the troops in the region.

Just a snippet about the strike itself:

A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground.

And the media went along for the ride, for the umpteenth time. Remember Brian Williams fawning about the beauty of the weapons?

At some point, this volatile mixture of warmongering and McCarthyism is going to start WW3, and they'll blame it on the Russians.

I think this quote illustrates the issue quite nicely:
“Did the Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely. Do we have intercepts to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president did not say: ‘We have a problem and let’s look into it.’ He wanted to bomb the shit out of Syria.”

Great illustration of a potential social study ... hero dude from across the room vs the girl in red's reaction !

Reminds me of this experiment around the 'bystander effect' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE5YwN4NW5o

I totally agree with her that environmental concerns turn "conservatives" off on any argument (funny, since it's conservation of the environment that they can't abide).
I think she should also be using financial phrases, because done properly, renewable energy saves you money in the long run. My solar system, for instance, paid for itself in the first 8 years of an expected 20 year lifespan, so I get 12 years of 'free' electricity and ignoring rate hikes, but most right wingers would claim it will never pay for itself and is nothing more than pie in the sky hippy fantasy because that's what Alex Jones and his ilk told them.
Showing people that being responsible will actually save them large sums of money is the number one way to convince them to change their behaviors, it's far more effective than any philosophical arguments. It's the main reason I bought my system, and is also a main reason I want an electric car.

Side note: the 'sit in your car in your garage' argument is the same one I use against anti-smokers. I tell them, "you sit in the car you drove here in to complain about some smoke with a hose from the tail pipe going into the window, I'll sit in my car smoking, and we'll see who dies first.". This is to illustrate that their complaints about the dangers of smoke are ridiculous and negligible compared to their own polluting behaviors.

jmd's theory sounds plausible.

I've also heard the interpretation that since she is a full body prosthesis, it is meant to illustrate the detachment she has to her sexuality which sounds plausible although I hate to read too much into literature.

Might just be titillation, Japan is certain not shy about injecting sex into its anime. According to here, the manga series creator had a history of sexualised manga prior to GitS:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1fl864/tactile_cacti_in_ranime_explains_why_nudity_in/?sort=confidence

It seemed to me that the longer explanation was meant to illustrate the fact that the Government allowed itself to be hoodwinked into this scheme to further enrich the wealthy and put the Government into debt. Rather than simply taxing the wealthy like it should have been doing in the first place.

Every expansion of NATO has been a hot topic over here, from the moment the reunified Germany joined NATO. We've attacked Russia twice last century alone and to betray them again in this fashion never sat well with quite a lot of folks, especially the old politicians who supported Willy Brand's "Entspannungspolitik" -- that's this guy.

To further illustrate my own stance on this, let me paraphrase Genscher and others: there can be no stability/security in Europe without Russia, and especially not against Russia.