It seems quite clear from the above comments you had no idea what the situation was with this sifter, but couldn't help yourself from taking a shot at chicchorea anyway.

AGAIN you so effortlessly make yourself look like a ...

THIS comment is why.

YOU do it to yourself every.single.time.

It is the fault of government,

If the government did not freely hand out such vast amounts of aid then the people will not take the Walmart job unless it paid better.

Also if people do need more money then make yourself more valuable for you employer.

Robert Reight illustration is utter useless. In 57 you did not have a welfare state

To answer Sanders question, should the tax payers subsidize Wall Mart. The answer is NO. But that is not the taxpayers fault it is Big Goverment trying to be nice, fair, kind, the right thing to do... but in the end Big Government interferes with capitalism and causes such imbalances then blames capitalism.

@VoodooV Like I've been saying all along, your posts are mostly attempts at intimidation. I enjoy answering some of your questions, because it helps me question my beliefs, something I think is constructive and that you seriously shouldn't be afraid of. We are all supposedly looking for the truth anyways. All this could be settled by answering my simple question, whether you'd agree or not, it wouldn't even necessarily be an argument against gun control. I was pointing out the apparent conflict between wanting people to be more responsible by taking their freedoms away, when taking their freedoms away might not contribute to making them responsible people in the long run. An unpresumptuous suggestion meant to be taken as food for thought.

Instead, you resort to being juvenile and making fun of me, while writing huge posts with my entire posts quoted afterwards as an attempt at making me turn away in horror at the sight of a huge wall of text. Sure, it takes me time to sift through all of it to see what really matters. You're trying to muscle your way through, and it's a waste of everyone's time. I actually take the time to make my posts short and to the point, did you notice that? I happen to think it's a good habit to have some consideration for the reader, why am I not surprised you have none for me?

So, instead of appreciating that I don't waste your time by making an effort at being succinct, you accuse me of avoiding some of your arguments. It's true, I avoid a few of them because I think they're irrelevant, it's called being selective. Now I know that was a bad idea. I'm terribly sorry. I won't do it anymore. I will take the time to answer the most points I can to the best of my ability, and if that my makes my posts tiresomely long and wastes my time, so be it.

I bet you're trying to flood me with words because this isn't about any truth, is it? It's about discouraging and distracting me from something. Ever heard of picking your fights? It's about being reasonable about yours and other people's times. After all, I do assume you have a life outside of this internet topic on videosift, don't you? Anyway, let's get to it:

- About emotional manipulation, you FAILED to prove it, and here's why:

When you obey traffic laws, you are being coerced if there is coercion as consequence for not obeying them. Will you get arrested? Will you get your car, which is your property, impounded if you disobey? Then yes, they are coercive laws.

When you decide not kill someone because the law will coerce you if you do, you're being coerced into not killing, even if you freely decide not to kill out of good morals and empathy for fellow human beings, the option of killing is always there in reality (you can always kill anyone if you really want to), but not legally. If you kill, you're under the threat of going to prison. The positive or negative language seems completely irrelevant, what matters is what happens when you disobey the law. If coercion ensues, the law is coercive, or, more accurately, its enforcement. I'm not actually making the distinction right now if it's a rule related to coercion itself (a rule that makes coercion more or less likely to happen), just pointing out the irrelevance of your distinction between negative and positive language.

Now, I have to admit that there is divergence when it comes to defining coercion, but there is no emotional content here as far as I can tell. I'm using it in the sense that people have a right to their life, property and freedoms, and when you take or threaten to take away any of those things (and have the power to do so), THAT is coercion. There is no emotion here, I am offended that you would think that I would resort to that, because I don't even have to. Coercion has a meaning to me, I'm just using the concept as it is. If there is an emotional content, SHOW ME what emotion that is. Up until now, you have FAILED to do so.

- About requiring things before freedoms are granted, I think you FAILED to make your point, here's why:

To type boring senseless posts on the internet, you require a keyboard. Maybe, if you could type with voice recognition, like I do, you wouldn't need a keyboard, but what matters is that you use something to type or produce characters that will be submitted to the videosift website and become a useless post. So, for the sake of argument, let's call this an "actual physical requirement".

Now, with a gun to your head, if I require that you, VoodooV, jump through actual flaming hula-hoops positioned vertically on an intricate obstacle course before typing in your videosift comments, the world would be a better place (at least videosift would). However, my requirements would be arbitrary in the sense that it imposes something not actually physically necessary to enjoy the hypothetical "freedom to post inane ramblings on videosift" (we are assuming it's a right), can you spot the difference?

So, requiring things that are not necessary to enjoy a freedom is not something that makes the freedom better or is in any way justifiable just because history is littered with the precedent of assholes like kings and despots requiring stupid things before we can enjoy freedoms that we supposedly already have. When it comes to guns, a law says we have a right to bear them. Any laws that restrict that supposed right are infringing on the freedom that comes from having that right.

- About the claim that people will be less responsible if they have less freedom:

"If I made decisions for you, I could make you act more responsibly, but that's not the same thing as making you a more responsible person."

"Over time, when we take people's freedoms away, they tend to be less responsible about the decisions we're not letting them make. There's no way they can learn about any different (good or bad) outcomes related to decisions they couldn't make, and they can't be held responsible for them either, so they can hardly become more responsible."

- About your reduction to absurdity claim that removing all the rules would make us "SUPER-Responsible":

"I don't think rules inevitably destroys our freedoms, let's make a more refined distinction:

- If a rule is meant to stop people from infringing on each other's freedoms, if it's a rule that makes people less likely to coerce each other, it's a good rule because we end up with less coercion happening (even counting the coercion necessary to enforce the rule), we end up with a more civilized society. There are not many of those kinds of rules around.

- If it's a rule that imposes some regulation because we don't trust that people will be responsible enough to do what's best for them regarding something unrelated to coercion, we not only restrict their freedom by coercion (in this case, coercion by the government), it doesn't make coercion less likely, so it's likely a bad rule."

The problem with removing all rules is that, without rules related to coercion, people would be too subjected to the threat or actual coercion from other people around them, society would be less civilized. Would that make them more responsible? That's a good question. On one side, they would have a lot more responsibilities if they had to worry about their own lives and safety every frickin' day, and all the terrible worries that comes with the unstable chaos of anarchy. However, given that they would enjoy less freedoms due to the constant coercion of others, they would likely end up being a lot less responsible, because they would have far less choices.

That's why I took the time to explain the difference between rules related to coercion and rules that just infringe on freedoms.

- About your examples of requirements before freedoms and rights are granted, here's a list of your "numerous examples" and my reply to each of them:

VoodooV: "You have the freedom to go to college..."
VoodooV: "You have the freedom to have a certain job..."

"Going to college or getting a job are not things people are entitled to (supposedly), there are no rights involved, so no freedom is being denied."

VoodooV: "You have the freedom to imbibe alcohol....IF you are a certain age and can demonstrate that you can use it safely"

I don't know about using it safely (what does that mean?), but regarding age restriction, I don't agree with those laws. I know, very "liberal" of me, but I think children are the responsibility of their parents, so it's a law that steps into parenting territory.

VoodooV: "And according to the right, you have the freedom to vote..."

About voting, I don't know, I guess being registered is a requirement for the voting process? Like the right to life requires... being alive?

"The voting process, on the other hand, seems to be something that requires registration (again, I'm not an expert on voting, so forgive me if I'm wrong), otherwise we end up just shouting to ourselves, "I vote for X"!"

VoodooV: "And having a gun, or a car, has a significant risk to infringe upon other's freedoms so it's not unreasonable to ask that you demonstrate proficiency and safety before using said items."

A driver's license is not about owning or using a car, but about driving in public venues. I could be wrong, but we don't need a license to drive a car in our own backyards, do we?

Simply owning a gun, on the other hand, not only isn't a violation of anything, it supposedly provides protection against these violations.

- About me supposedly contradicting myself, saying "there are no rules for us talking", then proposing a dare:

Did I shoot you in the face when you failed my dare? So I guess it's not the kind of rule in the sense that I didn't threaten to coerce you if you failed it. Do you understand what kind of rule I was talking about? Do you even understand what a contradiction means, or are you just taking advantage that not everyone that reads your posts knows exactly what you're referring to make yourself look smart even though you can't point out a contradiction if it rested flat in your deepest held political beliefs?

On the subject of contradictions, strictly speaking, there's no contradiction between calling you juvenile and being juvenile myself, even if I did so afterwards, and in retaliation, to give you a taste of it.

Ooooooooh... must be very embarrassing for you not to know what a contradiction stands for.

Here's your entire post quoted, because, why not?

Your comment has nothing to do with the content of this video, therefore is just hateful, useless gabber. Why dont you try to become more open minded about politicians policies before coming in here and making yourself look like an idiot.

Actually, that's exactly what I say, and average modern human morality is considerably superior to the filth that the biblical God advocates.

The moral standard of western civilization is founded upon judeo-christian beliefs. Read:

http://www.amazon.com/Book-that-Made-Your-World/dp/1595555455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366921071&sr=8-1&keywords=book+that+made+your+world

Following the morality the biblical God advocates is the hardest thing you will ever do. The standard of today is a superficial, politically correct morality where you pretend to be nice to people but curse them when they aren't around. God requires a transformation on the inside where you have genuine love for your fellow man.

I am only saying that they are wrong by todays generally agreed upon moral standards. Some of these moral standards are extremely effective and have been around since very early human communities, so they only have the illusion of being absolute due to high adherence rate.

Are you saying nigh universal adherence to certain moral standards isn't evidence for an absolute standard of morality?

Murder, theft, oppression and incest are three fairly obvious examples. The evolutionarily advantageous trait of society building tends to list it's effectiveness when such things are widespread. But we have a very long human tradition of sanctioning and celebrating murder and theft as long as it occurs well outside our cohort. Killing other tribes is celebrated in the bible, as is stealing their possessions. Ethically justified slavery took another 4000 years to mostly get rid of, and hell, it was common practice to fuck your fifteen year old cousin all the way up to about the late 1800s here in the good old US of A as long as it was under the marital auspices of the church, of course.

Yep, but thank God that his just definition of morality - if we didn't have god's guidance through scripture, we'd probably do crazy shit!

You don't understand what God was doing in the Old Testament, or why He did it the way He did. It is morally consistent with His goodness and holiness, and there are logical reasons for why this is so. So far you are not interested in hearing them or discussing them. When you are let me know. In the end you don't have any excuse for suppressing the truth about Jesus, no matter what you think about how God acted in the Old Testament.

Using the word 'absolute' is a concession to brevity, but nice try - seriously dude, this is laughable and it wouldn't even stand up in Jr. High debate - absolutes do exist, they just need to be well justified, and yes if you want to be nitpicky about it there is an ever so remote chance that 1+1 is not equal to two in some distant corner of the universe. But as humans with an admittedly limited scope of understanding, we have to accept that level of certainty. If you want to relegate your theory to claiming its space somewhere in the possibility that we might be wrong about the whole 2+2=4 thing, go right on ahead.

There, that's what I meant by absolute. happy?

Basically, what you're saying is that because 2+2 probably equals four everywhere in the Universe, you are free to make absolute statements about morality? The fact is that your belief system leaves you with no justification for any absolute statement what so ever. Why should 2 + 2 always equal 4 in the first place? Can you tell me why the laws of physics should work in the same way 5 seconds from now without using circular reasoning?

Can you justify any piece of knowledge without God? If you can then tell me one thing you know and how you know it. Could you be wrong about everything you know?

Well then thanks for the offer, but I think I'll pass in the whole god based morality thing. I prefer to have a really good reason to never slaughter innocent kids. But thanks for finally answering my question: there has been a good reason to butcher a toddler after all! Praise The Lord, for he is good!

It comes back to the same question: As the giver of life, and the adjudicator of His Creation, is it wrong for God to take life?

And here's another interesting brain tickler. If everything god commands is right, and god has a track record of testing his faithful with their willingness to commit infanticide, how can you say that this lady isn't moral?

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2001-08-17/news/0108170166_1_baby-s-death-baby-s-father-documents

The scripture is finished and anything which contradicts it is not of God.

Wrong, I know that things are wrong because humans and cultures have a long history of interacting with reality, and certain strategies have been more successful than others. You haven't spent one iota of your time discrediting this notion, whereas I have given you plenty of examples crediting mine and discrediting yours.

What I am supposed to be discrediting? You're asking me to nail jello to a wall. You have not even defined what "successful" is supposed to mean beyond pure survival. In that case, every civilization has been successful. Tell me what your definition of success is supposed to be.

For the millionth time, I have no hopes of convincing you of anything - you'll defend your stance against literally any proof. But you seem to come here on the sift with the intent of demonstrating to others that there is some logical basis for your beliefs.

What proof? The foundation of atheism stands upon the shifting sands of relative truth. You, the atheist, ultimately make yourself the measure of all truth. Because of that, you can't tell me a single fact about the world that you can justify.

Well you're failing miserably, mainly because you are only capable of restating the following sentence as if it is an agreed upon truth:

"Not only is the entire concept logically contradictory, but it doesn't match our experience, which is that some things are absolutely wrong. "

I don't expect you to have any good support for that, but the audience out there just waiting to be convinced, they will need at least something.

Torturing babies for fun; not absolutely wrong?

I'm still waiting for you to give Stalin some kind, any kind of argument as to why he should adopt your morality and abandon his own. If you can't tell Stalin why he is wrong, then you have no hope of escaping the charge of incoherency.

So, Walmart's greeters are actually part of their "loss prevention" system. Just having someone greet random people at the door lowers shoplifting theft. Most of them are (as this distinguished gentleman clearly is) retired folks getting a little extra income.
It's harder to make yourself steal---or maybe it stops/slows down the casual shoplifters who anxiety over being caught is suddenly heightened when someone greets them at the door to this otherwise enormous and anonymous business---especially if that greeting is a loud and enthusiastic "BAM"!
LOL

Easy. I could extend my list to a hundred for a sentence this long. I was prepping for the shortest sentence in the english language: Go.

1.You are clearly biased towards the English language. I guess people who don't speak English are shit out of luck, right Shepppard?

2. You are clearly biased towards standard contemporary western sentence structure. E.E. Cummings need not apply.

3.You are clearly biased towards whimsy, completely excluding seriousness from the debate. When you are ready to take the lampshade off your head, let me know.

4. You are biased towards making yourself the subject of the sentence. ME. ME. ME. WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?

5. You are biased in favor of commas and periods I see. You've relegated poor Mr. exclamation point to just a parenthetical afterthought, while poor Mr. Question mark is nowhere to be seen.

6. You are biased in favor of writing about animals. SPECIES TRAITOR!

7. Your are biased in favor of using the word fuzzy as an adjective to describe said animals, when furry, fluffy, frizzy, nappy, wooly, hairy or hirsute would have sufficed.

8. You are biased in favor of using the words 'not fuzzy' to describe said animals, when not furry,not fluffy,not frizzy,not nappy,not wooly,not hairy or unhirsute would have sufficed.

9. You are biased in favor of using compound sentences when a simple sentence would have worked just as well, which would have saved us all a lot of time, which we could have used to do important things like cure cancer and sift videos, but now that time is gone thanks to your overly, overly, overly, overly, overly, overly long compound sentence.

10. Lastly, you are biased in favor of writing sentences in response to absurd challenges from strange persons on the internet trying to make the point that every action you take is subtle prejudice against all of the other actions you didn't take. Every word you chose to use in your sentence shows bias against the words you didn't choose to use. The precise moment that you hit submit on your comment was an inadvertent disenfranchisement of the many other moments that might have appreciated the honor of time stamping your achievement.

It's biases all the way down.

You had absolutely no reason to explain yourself. why draw attention to you being the one with 400+ PP. No one said it was you but then you burst that bubble yourself. No one called you a hoarder. Why would you take such an innocuous phrase and make it personal.

I say you make yourself feel better and give every one of your buddies 20 each. Than they can give their buddies five each. Now you are not a hoarder in the eyes of everyone else. You can feel better and sleep well.

"Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real". After I cleaned up the Coke Zero coming out of my nose I had to check the corner of the screen to verify that, yes, that is Fox News.

@Velocity5

Thanks for clarifying your philosophy. Just to quote the Wiki page for "opportunity cost"quickly:

"Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone (that is not chosen)."

If people didn't care about opportunity cost, capitalism simply could not work. The problem you're describing is not that people don't care about opportunity cost, it's that different people value different things.

You seem to think economic productivity should be the only thing people value. And you're entitled to your opinion. But I think, as you noticed from the comments on this thread, that most people find that point of view to be repugnant--for what we think should be pretty obvious reasons.

One reason would be that such a viewpoint, if carried to its logical conclusion, would dismiss all arts, sports, and other leisurely pursuits as wastes of time. In your free time, if you're not working on ways of making yourself more productive, you're holding back the the economy/science. People are no longer people in such a world view, but are reduced merely to numbers representing their productivity. And in such a world what do we do with those who are unproductive (i.e. the disabled, the elderly, etc.)? If productivity is all you value then clearly such obstacles to progress should be eliminated. Or at the very least treated with the same derision you showed this cheerleader.

Are you starting to see why people responded so negatively to your comments?

No guys except you, huh? You better be prepared to make yourself available to every one of the ladies!
In reply to this comment by ant:
>> ^pumkinandstorm:

In reply to this comment by UsesProzac:
Soooo, @ant is your new best friend now, huh?? Well, I'm going to have to put a stop to that and start messaging you on your profile all the time!!

Profile PARTAYYYYYYY!!!! Bring all your friends. @ant and I are running out of things to talk about.


Yeah, and no guys except me!

@CaptainPlanet I'm drawing the connection so people could relate to why it is wrong to be prejudiced against the overweight. Yes, they could act straight, but they would be miserable. Just like some fat people could maintain weight loss, but be miserable. I'm saying both behavior sets are psycho/neurological in origin, and thus are difficult to really describe as a "choice." The data on +30 BMIs, and in fact using BMI as a health metric more generally has been largely discredited. They often didn't do things like control for smoking, or diet, or exercise. People that eat healthily, exercise, and otherwise make healthy life choices can still be fat, but be healthy. I know this from personal experience. The fact is with prolonged caloric restriction your body can become uncomfortable with the weight loss. It will instead go into "starvation mode" and convert the few calories you provide it into fat to replace the stores. Meanwhile, it deprives your nervous system of needed energy and you become depressed. Thus, you make yourself miserable, and don't lose any weight, and there is nothing you can do about it but become comfortable with who you are. Don't worry. It gets better.

I don't know what I said that deserved your reaction, but frankly your kind of acting like a dick about it.

On my visit to Australia, two things stick out in my mind. Of course I was only there for a short time. One, those Aussies will drink me under that table every time. Sweet J! I learned quickly to accept that this is the Australian past time... or at least for most of the people I found. Second seemed to be hitting on women. In the US, it seems much more difficult where you had to almost make yourself into a jackass. In Australia, I just said, "Hi." Maybe that foreign effect?

The most delicious thing about pistachios is the shell. See, the shell acts as a sort of limiter on the amount of pistachio you can feasible consume per second. It limits you just enough that you can never quite binge fast enough to make yourself sick of them. I find myself frantically trying to strip the salty pearl, desperately chasing the tail of the Dragon, fingers raw from the pursuit but I can never quite catch it.

Ofc, you could always stockpile shelled pistachios, but that is true madness. Who on earth could resist a unshelled pistachio for more than a second?

everybody likes to feel useful. humans take it to extremes!

you know tho, this kind of selective pressure by making yourself basically unbeatable is.... ta da! suicide attacks. or you can talk it out. (giggle)

evolution in action.